New blog!

This week, I’ve taken advantage of some of my funemployment time to we work our website infrastructure. As part of my new job (more on that soon!) I’ll be communicating publicly more and I need a better blog space. I set up a blogger a few years ago but I really hate it. It’s not that Blogger is a terrible platform per se. It just doesn’t integrate well with the rest of my website and the comments I got were 90% spam.

At the time, I used Blogger because I didn’t want to mess implementing a blog on my own website infrastructure. Why? The honest answer is an object lesson in software engineering. The last time I re-built my website I thought that building a website generator sounded like a fantastic excuse to learn some Ruby. Why not? It’s a great programming language for web stuff and learning new languages is good, right? While those are both true, software maintainability is important. When I went to try and add a blog, it’d been nearly 4 years since I’d written a line of ruby code and the static site generation framework I was using (nanoc) had moved to a backwards-incompatible new version and I had no clue how to move my site forward without re-learning Ruby and nanoc and rewriting it from scratch. I didn’t have the time for that.

This time, I learned my lesson and went all C programmer on it. The new infra is built in Python, a language I use nearly daily in my Mesa work and, instead of using someone else’s static site generation infra, I rolled my own. I’m using Jinja2 for templating as well as Pygments for syntax highlighting and Pandoc for Markdown to HTML conversion. They’re all libraries not frameworks so they take a lot less learning to figure out and remember how to use. Jinja2 is something of a framework (it’s a templating language) but it’s so obvious and user-friendly that it’s basically impossible to forget how to use.

Sure, my infra isn’t nearly as nice as some. I don’t have caching and I have to re-build the whole thing every time. I also didn’t bother to implement RSS feed support, comments, or any of those other bloggy features. But, frankly, I don’t care. Even on a crappy raspberry pi, my website builds in a few seconds. As far as RSS goes, who actually uses RSS readers these days? Just follow me on the fediverse (@gfxstrand@mastodon.gamedev.place) if you want to know when I blog stuff. Comments? 95% of the comments I got on Blogger were spam anyway. If you want to comment, reply to my toot.

The old blog lived at jason-blog.jlekstrand.net while the new one lives at www.gfxstrand.net/faith/blog/. I’ve set up my webserver to re-direct from the old one and gone though the painful process of checking every single post to ensure the re-directs work. Any links you may have should still work.

So there you have it! A new website framework written in all of 2 days. Hopefully, this one will be maintainable and, if I need to extend it, I can without re-learning whole programming languages. I’m also hoping that now that blogging is as easy as writing some markdown and doing git push, I’ll actually blog more.