Up, up, up into the clouds...

Finally it’s here, my blog has arrived! It’s been a busy few days getting things up and running. I’ve been transferring my domain to 123-reg, configuring DNS, finding an email provider, finalising the design, deploying to heroku and scrapping this first post together.

To get things up and running I’ve chosen to push everything up into the cloud. I’ve spent countless hours setting up servers in the past but to be honest, it’s really not where my passion lies. Heroku’s free plan suits my needs just fine for now and I must say I have been blown away at how easy those guys have made it to deploy rails apps, incredible!

I’ve opted for Google Apps to provide my email; the personal plan is free and easily provides me with what I need. Sending out emails will be a big requirement for the next project so I thought I’d get testing.
Anyways, here are a few ideas that spring to mind in terms of what I’m hoping to achieve with the site:

• Help other rails developers using examples from our development team’s experience.
• Hopefully improve my writing style. Simply by writing more.
• Keep the few people that care up to date with what’s going on in my life

Finally I’d like to thank the following, Lee Irving (informing about the management in 123-reg), David Wong (helping out with Google apps), David Elliott and Dave Kennedy for their expert DNS advice, Tom Tinsley for inspiring me to re-think my initial design (a backgroundlabs theme came to the rescue at the very last minute) and Leo Babauta with his book The Power of Less which inspired me to actually do something about my shockingly bad website that’s been hanging around.

I guess all that’s left to say is watch this space!