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Blog update

floyd - Mon 10 November 2014 - pelican, blog

A short update for the few people that read this: I moved away from blogger. Too feature-rich for the type of content I'm aiming for. Why should anyone need to wait on 2-3 js libs and a bunch of images when all the blog has is usually plain text content?

I wasn't sure what blogging 'platform' should I use. I started to dislike over-engineered solutions. I tried using dokuwiki for a while, turned to be a really nice tool, but requires often maintenance (security updates and stuff). The wiki markup is quite nice and easy to use though... And it doesn't need any kind of db (if one omits the fact that a bunch of textfiles can also be considered a database)

I remember reading about static site generators at some point... even tried Jekyll before (nothing fancy, just testing some basic stuff), and found it... convenient. No need for a wysiwyg editor, no need for writing HTML markup by hand (never again), no need to use a web browser to type a simple post. A basic HTTP server, git, and a few hooks/scripts, and you're set :) There was only one catch, for some reason I don't really like Ruby. It's a great language but... not for me.

As I love Python, I thought well, there should be some Jekyll-like tools written in Python. It turns out that yes, there are quite a few. At least Hyde, "Jekyll's evil twin", and Pelican. Markdown, plugin and theme availability was a criteria as well, so Pelican won. Actually, I just tried writing 1-2 posts and I liked the easy of use that comes with Pelican. It has great docs, too.

I tried to make the new site's layout close to the previous blogger setup (I'm mainly referring to the URLs and page names), with some degree of success. Some posts have been deleted, or moved aside (to be reviewed later, hopefully).

The only thing that's missing are the comments. The new site uses Disqus, and it was impossible to copy the old comments to it...

P.S: the old blog is still available at nixfloyd.blogspot.com, and the URLs on the new one use the same format, so if anyone has bookmarks to my stuff (which I doubt), they'll still work.