Updated Site with BashBlog

I've become rather unhappy with the complexity of using wordpress to manage this site and have been feeling like it's taking away from me even wanting to work on it. So I began a search for a static site generator that provided me with the traits I desired. Mainly that it be very simple and that it will last. My worry with learning a new system is that in 10 years I need to learn some new system. In general learning isn't a problem, but if I learn something specific to only that tool, when it's gone that information is useless.

Now i'm sure wordpress will linger on forever, but it's tough to tell with a lot of other tools. Since I don't want to become the maintainer of a tool it means that the best solution is to find one that is simple enough I can maintain it while learning something valuable.

To that end I've decided to start publishing this site with the wonderful tool created by Carlos Fenollosa called bashblog.

It's a complete bash blogging tool that makes use of standard unix tools, bash, and not much else. It covers exactly my needs:

• It's very simple
• It works
• I can fix it while learning a useful skill (bash scripting)
• It can handle markdown (Note entirely sure I'm always going to use this)
• It can create an RSS feed

That's pretty much it. We'll see if this ends up being the permanent solution or not. Some things that I've already identified as improvements that I'd like to make include:

• Creating a post directory for posts to be stored in
• Creating an archive file of the site to upload
• Provide automatic image resizing with automatic linking to the full resolution image
• Remove the need for both html and markdown files for posts.
• Provide support for static non-blog pages, that use the same header and footer as the blog

After that it should be mostly complete. Once I have my changes cleaned up I'll probably post them as well.

Tags: Writing