About

Once again, I've completely changed the pre­sen­ta­tion mechanism of this site without changing the content. Again. Maybe it'll stick this time...

Technology

This might be the last time -- really. I've settled on using Markdown (or maybe Mul­ti­Mark­down) as the authoring format, and just using a simple templating mechanism to translate the product to HTML and add headers and footers.

I started by wanting something that I could edit off line, and that provided a good backup op­por­tu­ni­ties. To that end, I became enamored with Blikis that could store their content in git. There was about a year of trying this and that, but the really promising contender was ikiwiki.

Except that I couldn't get it to install in any main­tain­able way on my OpenSUSE laptop or the CentOS VMs that ran the house. Seriously? There were just so many per module de­pen­den­cies that weren't in any of the package repos­i­to­ries I was already using. So I found myself main­tain­ing an overlay of perl modules, chasing interde­pen­den­cies, blah, blah.

So I gave up.

About a year later -- after having switched my daily machine to a MacBook Air -- I started to migrate all of those CentOS VMs to a Mac Mini running Mac OS X Lion. So I tried to use the bundled wiki, but it's un­char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly ugly, and Lion's admin interface for the web server is horrible. Horrible and broken. I started looking again.

Then I found Gollum, which is the wiki software used by GitHub. Of course once you look into that ecosystem, Jekyll hits you like a blinding flash.

So I gave Jekyll a go for a couple of years. The main problem I had with it was that it's written in Ruby, and I read Ruby like a pre-schooler at best. I needed to make a few changes, add some extensions, and there was just no way for me to get it done. Oh, and the doc­u­men­ta­tion for Liquid is just a vacuum. So I had to make yet another change...

I had been exercising Python quite a bit, so I started looking for Jekyll-like systems written in that language. Pelican seemed to stand out, but Acrylamid really got my attention.

And that's where we are.

History

The im­me­di­ate­ly prior attempt used Jekyll, the static site generator created by the founder of GitHub.

Previous in­car­na­tions were written in:

Empty Promises

This is the space where I usually promise to actually add content once the "main­te­nance is under control." Really, the issue is that no matter what, there's always tinkering to do with the service, and no time to relax long enough to publish something. I'm done with that.