Tagged blogging (Blog)

• Sep 14, 2023, 8:11 PM -04:00

  On the Durability of Plain Text

  If you want something to last, use ASCII

  My blog is 16 years old. I've rotated through several blogging engines in that time (Bloxsom, YAWT 1.0/2.0, Pelican and finally Eleventy) but they all have one thing in common: they all process blog entries stored as plain text files.

  The fact that all my blog entries are stored as plain text files on my computer is, I believe, one of the main reasons my blog has lasted this long. Text files are trivial to back up. Text files don't really crash and rarely get corrupted. Text files are readable and writable on any computer manufactured since the 1980's - hell, the 1960's if I let punch cards into this conversation. When you contrast this simple durability with, for example, a MySQL data store (used by several blogging engines, including one of the most popular ones, WordPress), with all of its attendant version compatibility and data corruption issues, the superiority of plain text becomes undeniable if you're trying to write something that lasts.

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• Jun 1, 2022, 8:44 AM -04:00

  Fifteen Years of Blogging

  Fifteen years ago today, I started blogging

  Fifteen years ago today, I published my first blog post and I wanted to mark the occasion with - you guessed it! - a blog post. I didn't really have a strong sense of what I wanted to say but, anniversaries being a chance to reminisce, I found myself revisiting what I've written over the years.

  It's definitely a mixed bag. The tone and content vary quite a bit. For this reason, when people ask me what this blog is "about", I don't usually have a ready answer, and this sometimes catches them off guard because common wisdom states that blogs typically have themes. People will manage a cooking blog, for example, or a programming blog, or a reading blog. Among other things, it's a way to collect followers - people seem to place greater trust in a blog when it focuses on one subject.

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• Apr 4, 2022, 3:00 PM -04:00

  Link Contexts In Eleventy

  An #indieweb aware approach to unfurling URLs in @eleven_ty

  As a participant in the IndieWeb, I publish my share of likes, replies, reposts, and bookmarks. These posts all have one thing in common - they refer to another, external URL and only make sense in the context of that URL.

  This being the case, it's nice to give my readers (and myself) some sense of what I'm referring to when I post that content. The process of scraping metadata from URLs for display purposes is called "URL unfurling" and implementing it efficiently on an Eleventy based website is not entirely trivial, especially when you're trying to save your Netlify build minutes, so it's worth sharing what I've learned.

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• Mar 23, 2022, 3:33 PM -04:00

  Taming Eleventy Tags: Or How I Learned To Tolerate Double Pagination

  Pagination in Eleventy is bit strange. Out of the box, Eleventy comes with support for something the developers call "pagination", but it might not be the sort of pagination you're used to.

  As you probably already know, Eleventy is a static site generator. It generates output HTML files from input template files. In the simplest case, one HTML file is generated for each (non-layout) input template.

  The feature known as pagination in Eleventy is basically a way of getting around that limitation, allowing you to generate multiple output files from one template file. If you squint, you can see how this maps to the traditional idea of pagination (i.e. we want to break down a long list of items into smaller sized pages, writing only one template for the page) and although this is, indeed, a common way to use pagination in Eleventy, it turns out that the feature is much more generic than you might think - and, paradoxically, less useful than you might think.

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• Mar 21, 2022, 6:53 AM -04:00

  Changes To Post Organization

  After some consideration I've decided to remove the articles from my "Posts" feed and rename it to "Notes". It now contains just my notes and photos (and videos if I ever start posting those). As before, my articles are available in my "Blog" feed.

  Initially, my reason for mixing articles, notes and photos into one "posts" feed was that I suspected at least some of my readers would want a feed just for "original content", and the "posts" feed provided that. I still think this is true, but some other insights have led me to reconsider the approach.

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• Mar 9, 2022, 4:46 PM -05:00

  Eleventy For IndieWeb Enthusiasts - Basic Setup And Post Organization

  Classifying your #indieweb posts with @eleven_ty

  As mentioned previously, I recently converted my website over to Eleventy. I'm an IndieWeb participant and, moreover, my website is fairly complex so I ended up writing (or, in some cases, pilfering) a fair amount of code to make it all work together in an acceptable manner. I thought I would document the process via a series of blog posts in case anyone else finds it of value.

  None of this is intended to be an Eleventy tutorial and you'll get the most from these posts if you already know something about how Eleventy works.

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• Mar 6, 2022, 12:08 PM -05:00

  From Pelican to Eleventy

  Making the switch from Pelican to @eleven_ty

  After roughly five years, I've finally decided to switch my blog over from Pelican to Eleventy. I'd be lying if I said that I wasn't at least partially swayed by the fact that all the cool kids seemed to be doing it but, with that in mind, I do have some (hopefully) legitimate reasons for making the switch.

  Pelican bills itself as a static site generator, and so it is, but one that focuses more on traditional, single user blogs. Pelican can, of course, be used as a CMS, and you can certainly use it to create arbitrary, standalone pages and websites, but the features in support of this usage seem more bolted on than organic. There are certain assumptions built into Pelican that stem from its original purpose as a blogging engine that are occasionally irritating to circumvent.

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• Feb 27, 2022, 5:51 PM -05:00

  A Place For Everything

  Taming the #indieweb post type zoo

  If you're a programmer of a certain age, you've either read or know about Design Patterns, a book on software architecture popular in the 90s and early 2000's. The book was sort of like a repository of TV tropes for the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) world in that it provided a convenient vocabulary for describing what were usually eminently recognizable software engineering techniques that nonetheless often lacked punchy, easy to remember names.

  Notably, the book was more descriptive than prescriptive. It described preexisting techniques that were already in use in the "wild", so to speak.

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• May 1, 2020, 6:24 AM -04:00

  On Gardens and Streams

  Digging into the differences between wikis and blogs #indieweb

  I attended my first IndieWebCamp session last week, on the subject of "gardens and streams", otherwise known as wikis and blogs. Given the current global situation, the entire thing was remote; I participated via Zoom. It was fun! I'm glad I got to meet everyone.

  Wikis, and how they differ from blogs, is a topic that interests me. You may not know it, but my domain sports a wiki, powered by MoinMoin. I mostly use it to store technical notes and recipes.

  I'm no historian, but it seems obvious that wikis were created mostly in order to make certain kinds of websites easier to build and maintain. In the days when "webmaster" was an actual job title and when traditional websites were maintained by an elite group of technical people, using arcane languages like HTML, wiki powered websites:

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• Apr 28, 2020, 12:01 PM -04:00

  Pieces of Thinking

  Why I write #indieweb

  Jan-Lukas Else recently asked the Hacker News community why most of them don't have blogs, and published his thoughts on their answers to his own blog. The conversation was interesting and got me thinking about my own motivations for maintaining this site.

  The first thing that stands out for me in the responses is the number of people who said that they quit blogging because they didn't have any readers. It was more than I expected. I don't think I fully realized how important readership was to some people in the technical community, probably because I think can safely say that it's not of great importance to me.

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• Mar 30, 2018, 1:25 PM -04:00

  Blogging with Emacs and Pelican

  Pelican is my blogging engine of choice these days. Given that Emacs is usually (though not always) my text editor of choice, it made sense to try and streamline the process of writing blog entries for Pelican with Emacs. What follows is my attempt to document such an endeavour, partly because I think it might be useful to the (undoubtedly tiny) cross section of people who use both Emacs and Pelican, but mostly so that I have something to refer back to when the need arises.

  Note that this blog entry does not cover things like actually setting up your Pelican blog. It also doesn't cover my reasons for using Pelican in the first place; for that, feel free to peruse my other blog entry on the subject.

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• Feb 25, 2017, 9:35 PM -05:00

  On the Irony of Using Static Site Generators

  As I've mentioned before, I've recently switched to pelican as my blogging engine.

  Pelican is a static site generator. This means that it generates static HTML files using templates and content as input, which can be then uploaded (via rsync, for example) to a plain vanilla web server (I use nginx).

  So far the experience has been fairly smooth. The web server setup is much simpler, since there's no application to run. And it's forced me to re-think what kinds of information I want on my pages. For example, in an effort to avoid regenerating the entire site every time I publish an article, I created standalone index pages for tags, categories and archives rather than display the counts on every page.

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• Dec 12, 2016, 10:06 PM -05:00

  Moving to Pelican

  After a good run, I've decided to retire YAWT for the time being. I found the workflow I set up to be a bit complicated, and I found myself wanting to concentrate more on writing rather than the nitty-gritty of publishing. I also got a bit tired of the lone wolf thing and I wanted to try using piece of software that other people actually use.

  But I still liked the basics of my workflow. I still liked writing blog entries with a standard text editor (Emacs in my case). I still liked the idea of keeping my site under source control, as plain files. In other words, I did not want to switch to Wordpress.

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• Aug 5, 2012, 3:22 AM -04:00

  YAWT Lives!

  I started this blog 4 years ago, got a few entries in, and then promptly shut the whole thing down when it got overrun with spam. I have now resurrected it, using a new version of YAWT written in python which, for lack of a better name, I shall call YAWT 2.0.

  At some point, I hope to write an article on the features of YAWT 2.0, but for the moment I'm just happy this thing is working again. Somewhat working, anyway; comments are still deactivated until I figure out how to do it properly.

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• Sep 8, 2008, 11:39 PM -04:00

  Comments and Trackbacks Have Been Deactivated

  When I started this blog, I didn't expect very much in the way of comments or trackbacks. I also didn't expect any spam, which means I didn't take any precautions. I mean, how would anybody even know about this blog?

  Silly, silly me.

  So, I have turned off comments and trackbacks until I figure out a reasonably reliable way of separating the spam from the ham. This will probably entail a bit of a rewrite of YAWT as I figure out a way to do this in a clean and modular manner. Why make it easy on myself when I can make it hard?

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• Apr 6, 2008, 8:00 PM -04:00

  New Blog

  So I got myself a new weblog, hosted on Netfirms. I'm not particularly enjoying the Netfirms experience, but it was only $10 for a year and I get SSH access. They're quite skimpy with the perl modules, forcing me to install a bunch of stuff in my home directory.

  I'm using a homemade blogging program because I got tired of blosxom's ugliness and I didn't really like what I saw of Bryar. I'm calling it YAWT in my head - short for Yet Another Weblog Tool. I'm hoping to extend it at some point to handle photo galleries in a seamless and efficient manner - my last attempt to write an online photo manager was quite slow. We'll see.

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• Jul 13, 2007, 11:56 AM -04:00

  Blosxom Warts

  At the moment I'm using blosxom to generate this blog. I'm using blosxom for the following reasons:

  the HTML is completely under my control.

  there is no database or PHP required.

  the codebase is tiny, which means I have a better chance of fixing whatever problems crop up and also of integrating it into my site.

  So far, it seems to work okay. My blog looks more or less the way I want it to. More specifically, it looks like it's a seamless part of my web site, which is exactly the effect I was after.

  That being said, I'm finding that blosxom has a few warts:

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• Jun 24, 2007, 11:51 AM -04:00

  Markdown Is Cool

  I'm using Markdown to write this blog entry. I've converted all my other entries to use Markdown as well. Markdown is cool.

  One of the annoying things about Blosxom (and perhaps other blogging tools) is the need to write the entries in HTML. Now, I have nothing against HTML and, as I've mentioned before, I insist on having full control over the HTML that gets used on my site, especially for layout purposes. But for writing actual text, I find the markup a bit tedious, especially since I always end up using the same tags over and over again.

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• Jun 1, 2007, 11:29 PM -04:00

  Joining the Rest of Mankind

  So I've finally gotten a blog. They've only been around for, what? Ten years? I guess I'm not a bandwagon jumper.

  Lately though, there've been a couple of instance where a) I've had an opinion that I wanted to share with the world and b) I didn't feel like writing a full-blown essay to express it. I guess this is where a blog fits the bill.

  Anyway, after reviewing various blogging options I've finally settled on Blosxom as my blogging tool. At the moment I think this is the best option for me because:

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