Over the years since I've been blogging, I've used various systems (Blosxom, Moveable Type, WordPress, and latterly Ghost) which have all had their great features. In addition, I've been using a domain 'pipetree.com' that I've had since Piers and I came up with the name during a Perl conference in London (it was YAPC - Yet Another Perl Conference) in 2000.

We needed a name for our shared co-located host gnu.pipetree.com and decided, literally, to think of two random words and put them together. And the name has stuck ever since. Unfortunately I've had all sorts of issues with Network Solutions, where the domain name is managed ... so much so that I've pretty much given up getting them to allow me to update my records. Piers had moved on to his own domain names a good while ago, so it has been just me using pipetree.com for a long while now.

I've been thinking a lot about 2019 and decided to clear the decks a little, to be somewhat more organised and to make a clean break. So I'm planning to retire pipetree.com over the next few months, and have moved to a new domain qmacro.org where you're reading this now. I've embraced the GitHub Pages approach to blogging, continuing on with using Markdown, something I started with Ghost (it was one of the main attractions of the platform).

My existing pipetree.com platform is served from a Linode-based virtual private server; I've been very happy indeed with Linode, but my own management of the server has lagged a little, and while I used to run various services on it, including the Ghost installation for my blog at pipetree.com/qmacro/blog, there's not much need for it any more, and it's become a little bit disorganised.

So I have migrated all my old posts to this new place, using Jekyll (as the basis for GitHub Pages) and I've made my first steps with the Liquid templating language to build my new homepage. I know that I'm breaking all my old URLs, but I feel it's the right move to make at this stage. I'm now managing my domains with Google Domains which is super simple, and a far better experience than Network Solutions. And I have a domain name that more reflects me and my identity on the Web.

I am of course still blogging over on the SAP Community and will continue to do but my personal space here will continue to serve in the wider context, as it always has done.

So there you are. A new start and new domain name ready for 2019, even running over HTTPS, through the power of Let's Encrypt. In the meantime, happy holidays!