About

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 were…

…at least until I found out about Hugo. Hugo, written in Golang, is the current leader in the static site generation space. It’s fast and has plenty of documentation.

It seems to be en vogue to take an open soure web theme, add your own layers, and re-publish it. I found some themes I liked, but they were very hard to alter because of their technical debt. In most cases there were several types of framework already being used, and just making a trivial change was hard. So I wrote my own from scratch. I’m pretty sure it’s ugly – but I don’t know any better and I can change it however I want.

So here we are.

History

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

Previous incarnations were written in:

• Wordpress
• XHTML 1.0 Strict + CSS 2.1
• HTML
• The Website Meta Language
• a customized XHTML variant + XSLT with style attributes added to the HTML to “emulate” CSS when few browsers did it right

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.