I've always been a fan of rat rods -- hot rods imitating and exaggerating the early hot rods of the 30's and 40's, but usually left looking rusty and unfinished.

From the Wikipedia article on the topic:

The rat rod is the visualization of the idea of function over form. Rat rods are meant to be driven, not shown off. Sometimes the customization will include using spare parts, or parts from another car altogether.

I really appreciate the ethos of building a car with whatever spare parts you can get your hands on. It really cuts to the core of favouring simple solutions over complex ones. It also does't mean you have to compromise on workmanship or quality; check out the pipework on this one as an example. Attention to detail is just as important as on any other car.

The car shows around South-east Queensland usually have a good turn-out of rat rods. I've been to a few over the years, so here are some photos of the rat rods I've seen at the shows.

Wintersun 2008

Wintersun 2009

Greazefest 2009

Twighlight Hot Rod Show 2010

For more photos from this show, check out my previous post.

Found

I've also uploaded a few pictures of cool rat rods that I've found over the years to found.slightlytallerthanaverageman.com -- one, two, three, four, five, and six.

I've lost the original source for these, unfortunately. If you know, then let me know and I'll link as appropriate.

Australia Day means beer, a BBQ in the sun and Triple J's Hottest 100. This year the weekend also meant the Twilight Hot Rod Show at Rocklea, Brisbane.

It was a good turnout of Aussie classics, American iron, hot rods, rat rods and kustoms. Not as big as Wintersun, mind you, but around the size of Greazefest. Plenty big enough for a good afternoon in the sun.

I managed to snap a few pictures before my camera died, then I had to rely on my iPhone and Fi's camera phone. That'll teach me to charge my batteries!

Speaking of Tumblr, Rachel has started up her own account at shinyredthings. Enjoy!

I invite you all to have a look at my new tumblog at found.slightlytallerthanaverageman.com.

I'll be using it to post photos, quotes, videos and assorted other things I find on the Internet. None of the content there will feed into this blog, nor will any of this blog feed into it. I intend to keep both separate -- this blog for things I create; that one for things I find.

In a way this is part of my goal to "produce more" this year -- a small part, no doubt, but a part at least.

For those interested in how it's run, well I cheated a bit and created an account at Tumblr. They make it incredibly easy to get started and re-direct a domain of your choosing as I've done.

I've decided to move the back-end of my blog away from WordPress to a Ruby-based system called Jekyll. The interesting part about Jekyll is that nothing is dynamic; there are no Ruby scripts running on the server. Everything instead is generated locally as a set of static files which I sync to my hosting using the venerable rsync. If everything's gone to plan you shouldn't see any interruption, and only minor cosmetic changes.

Why bother? I have no problems with WordPress, I think it's a fantastic system and one of the shining examples of a well-designed usable open source application.

It's just overkill for my use case.

This is a personal blog, updated relatively infrequently. Why have a full-blown PHP framework and a MySQL backend? I don't need all of that complexity sitting between the words I write and the final rendered format. For a while now I've been curious about this class of blogs, and seeing as removing complexity is one of my mantras for this year it seemed like a good project to tackle.

Another reason is that my blog is now a directory of text files annotated in Markdown stored on my laptop. These files are synced into Dropbox and backed up with Time Machine, meaning I have both on-site and off-site backups for free. I've never had a backup of this blog before, and the times I tried to set up automatic backups with WordPress I never got anywhere productive.

However, in order to keep having comments enabled I've had to migrate and integrate with Disqus. The migration from WordPress was painless, but it's a third-party system that I'm forced to use where I don't control the data. Next on my to do list is to automatically extract and save the comments from Disqus into my local repository. It's not all bad though -- the ability for my readers to authenticate via Facebook Connect and OpenID is pretty cool, as is the ability to track responses to my articles via Twitter.

The final reason is that this system brings me a lot closer to the final generated HTML. For the time being I've simply ported my WordPress theme into the Liquid templating mechanism that Jekyll uses without modifying the CSS. I hope to do a visual redesign soon.

Overall though I'm pleased with how the migration has turned out. I'm excited about the simplicity this new system offers, and hopefully the reduced friction between my text editor and a published product will result in more output this year.

Why not give blogging like a hacker a go as well?