I’ve re-done the site slightly, so hopefully there aren’t too many broken things left lying
about the place. I’ve now moved to using Jekyll, which
is a “blog-aware static site generator”.
Basically, it allows me to keep my posts on disk (in git, of course) as a series
of markdown files - one per post. I can also prefix each file with some yaml metadata, such
as tags. This all means I can just write my posts offline, in my editor of choice.
It seems to me a much cleaner approach than the unwieldy php4/mysql site I was using
before - every time I had to fix an issue, I winced at PHP and the fact that I couldn’t
always reproduce the issues my server was having, leading me into the stressful land of
debugging and modifying a live site.
Plus, in the unlikely event that I get slashdotted, I’ll be ready ;).
Fixing Jekyll
It hasn’t been all rosy though. I’ve had to fix a number of issues or omissions I’ve found
in jekyll, and that is already on top of an unofficial
branch to better support tagging - not the most
stable environment. The fact that there are almost 250
forks on github alone worries me though - either
nobody is sending patches upstream, or upstream is not very receptive to said patches. It
makes for a fairly hectic landscape.
FTP Sync - not as simple as you might expect
Oh, and the fairly awful state of FTP synchronisers for linux is surprising. I eventually got the
sitecopy program to work for me, but not without a lot of complaining on its part. And
this was after trying 3 other FTP syncing programs, none of which could even complete a
single update before dying of various causes. Admittedly, this is mostly a problem because
I don’t have SSH access. rsync would work wonderfully, otherwise…
