This website started its life back in 2004 as a now dead JRoller blog (www.jroller.com/jamesmead/).

When I joined Reevoo, having started using Ruby on Rails, I decided to setup an instance of Typo at blog.floehopper.org hosted by Slicehost.

Although setting up my blog on Typo was a good introduction to using Rails, my installation of Typo quickly became out-of-date. I also felt that using Typo was massive overkill for what is really a very simple website. So in November 2009, taking inspiration from Chris Roos, I decided to convert it to a static website generated using Webby. At the same time I decided to move the website to jamesmead.org in an effort to centralize my presence on-line. I moved my blog to a sub-directory of this website.

In December 2010, inspired by the work Go Free Range (and Tom Ward in particular) was doing with O2, I started using freerange-puppet and freerange/deploy overridden by floehopper-deploy to provision the server and deploy the apps.

Rackspace acquired Slicehost in October 2008, but it wasn’t until January 2012 that I was forced to move this site onto a Rackspace Cloud server.

In October 2016 I converted this site to use the Middleman static site generator instead of Webby. The latter hadn’t been updated in many years and only supported Ruby v1.8. At around the same time I moved the site onto a Linode server and automated deployment from Github via Travis CI using rsync.

In September 2019 I setup a GitHub Actions workflow to deploy the site automatically to GitHub Pages.