Every .NET developer I know has war stories about past horrors of deployments gone wrong. My theory is that’s because there’s not a good, universally accepted way to handle deployments of .NET apps on windows. Octopus steps in and offers a solution that, in my recent experience, dramatically simplifies the .NET deployment problem with a really elegant solution.

As most .NET developers do at some point or other, I was recently faced with a need for an automated build tool. For various reasons I’ve come to the point where I’m not really satisfied with any of the ones currently available, so I decided to write one. Pyke is the result of that itch.

I won’t spend a whole lot of time here trying to explain my reasons for why I’ve decided to port my blog over to Octopress…most people that ever see it aren’t going to care anyway, and for the scarce few that might actually read it often enough to recognize the difference, if you’re really curious, I’ll leave it to you to ask if you are interested. The short of it is, Octopress brings a number of things to the table out of the box that I wanted in a blog platform that I’ve long felt I was fighting with WordPress to get. I still think WordPress is a fantastic platform for many, many scenarios…but Octopress does a number of things that are very appealing to a those of us with geek-like tendencies such as myself, which is why I’m making the switch.

The more important consequence of the port is going to be the impact on current feed subscribers (are there any? really?) and search engines, as some of my older content will go away, and my URL structure will end up being at least a little bit different. Different enough that people that find links to posts from my old blog through search engines may not find what they’re looking for immediately. I’ll do my best to get as much of my older content that generated interest ported over here as soon as possible, and maybe more importantly, get a good 404 page setup as soon as possible too.

Ultimately my hope is that some of the things that it (Octopress) brings to the table will make it a little bit less painful for me to actually get on the ball and write some of the things I’ve been dying to write about (though I’m fairly certain that it won’t buy me any more time…which is ultimately one of the biggest hinderances to my writing). I’ve been working on and with some really fun stuff at work, and learning a lot from it, and I’d really like to share some of it and get some feedback on it from people I know are smarter than I. I’d like for my blog to be a two-way street where I can share and learn at the same time. Hopefully I can share enough to be able to make that happen.