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.

And that's where we are.

Inspiration

Let me say that the organization of the index page was ~~stolen from~~ inspired by jnrbsn.com. I struggled with how the front page should be organized. Originally, it had the content of what is now my biographical page, then it was just a landing site with nothing useful. Eventually it became the blog index during the Wordpress years.

None of those were quite right. The idea of a "today" or "summary" view of my online presence is exactly what was needed, though. It just took seeing an example to focus my attention.

History

Last time I decided to try Wordpress, and it didn't suck. I had started looking Content Management Systems (CMS) for one of my clients at work, and Wordpress seemed the slickest. Oh, and it was already in portage. :)

Previously, this site was written in pure XHTML + CSS. There was a tiny bit of JavaScript to select which part of the menu tree to expand. The only pure CSS2 expandable menu implementations I could create were of the "pop-up" variety -- and I couldn't stand those.

This is the sixth major rebirth with essentially the same content. Previous incarnations were written in: XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS 2.1; HTML; The Website Meta Language; and a customized XHTML variant + XSLT with style elements added to the HTML to "emulate" CSS when few browsers did it at all.

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.