Back to life

I've never been the most active blogger, but 2 years between posts seems a little excessive, even to me! I wish I could explain the cornucopia of reasons for this, but I'll just point a couple of accusatory fingers at the extraordinary busyness of life (in the intervening time I moved to Edinburgh, the LHC restarted, and my working life has generally been batshit insane) and general frustration at my server setup. You may also be frustrated with the slowness of this server: turns out that running a mail server and a Rails application on a 256 MB virtual server puts me deep into the swap memory zone and site performance accordingly drops into the region marked "painful". I'd have loved to fix this 2 years ago, but a) I've written enough web apps in the past to not want to make another half-assed one, and b) did I mention work being batshit insane? Anyhoo, someone asked me at a recent meeting when I was going to start blogging again, and after the initial shock of discovering that I have some sort of niche audience I decided that I should start venting my spleen in more substantial ways than the 140 chars offered by Twitter.

A bit of recent server upgrading means that this site is not quite as slow as it has been -- I'm enormously impressed by the service from Slicehost, by the way -- and I'm going to try and replace Radiant with something a little more fun, speedy, and memory-efficient in this little pre-2011 gap. Suggestions of CMSes/blog engines with user comments, picture galleries, code highlighting support, etc. and support for static content (such as this site's Cambridge night climbing content) would be much appreciated. Oh, and because I'm a picky person and have not found Ruby/Rails to be a terribly pleasant development experience, being based on Python would also be a big bonus!