Welcome to the all new Urban Mainframe. It is almost exactly two years since I wrote my last post on the previous incarnation of this website. In that post I promised that the website would soon be active again. I told you how I’d started to recover from my blogging apathy and that I was about to introduce a redesign and a whole bunch of new features.

It didn’t happen (but you know that already)! So you’re probably wondering what went wrong? Well, I began to suffer that most dreaded of programming diseases: feature creep. My ambitions for the Urban Mainframe grew (and oh, how they grew). I added millions of lines of code (perhaps a slight exaggeration) to an already bloated CMS. I began to code up new features without completing existing ones. I created so many bugs…

There came a point where I just couldn’t keep up. My code-base was a complete mess, a nightmare to maintain and utterly unworkable - and so I entered my second period of blogging apathy. I simply gave up.

In the meantime… real life carried on. I changed career, moved house, reunited with my mother and sisters whom I had lost touch with over twenty years ago, fell in love, had my heart broken (cue the violin), suffered depression, started college… and so on. My inclination to blog just wasn’t there.

Recently, however, I’ve found myself reading all my old favourite blogs. I’ve been trawling through archives and following links. I’ve rediscovered the urge to self-publish. I want to blog again.

Of course I couldn’t just pick up where I’d left off. I’ve already described how mangled my CMS had become. So I have taken the plunge and started from scratch. I’ve adopted WordPress as my blogging tool and I’ve deployed a (slightly modified) off-the-shelf theme rather than create a bespoke design. I’ve even ditched my treasured Rackspace servers in favour of a cheap and cheerful hosting package from (mt). Wow!

And the future? I’m not going to make any promises people. At the time of writing I’m keen to get going again. I’m eager to write, eager to code, eager to publish. I don’t know if my new-found enthusiasm will last or if it will wane. But for the time being at least… I’m back.

P.S: Don’t forget to revise your bookmarks for the current domain (http://blog.urbanmainframe.com/) and don’t forget to update your RSS feed subscriptions either!