I started this post in February 2014. Actually, I might have started it in July 2013 (while sitting in a Bruegger’s Bagels on the same day that I met up with two people from Urbanalta in what would later become my full-time job, to be precise). I really don’t remember.
Here goes another migration of my sparse content from the past 8 (er… 10) years. This time, I’m giving up my Wordpress instance that I’ve migrated around 3 or 4 times (from wordpress.com, then Dreamhost, then Linode, then tortois.es), and completely failed to migrate this time (I neglected to back up Wordpress' MySQL tables). I still have an old XML backup, but it’s such a crufty mess at this point that I’d rather start fresh and import in some old content.
Wordpress is a fine platform and it produces some beautiful results. However, I feel like it is very heavy and complex for what I need, and I have gotten got myself into many train-wrecks and rabbit-holes trying to manage aspects of its layout and behavior and media handling.
My nose is already buried in Emacs for most else that I write. It’s the editor I work most quickly in. I’m already somewhat familiar with git. So, I am giving Jekyll a try (later note: now using Hakyll instead.). Having a static site pre-generated from Markdown just seems like it would fit my workflow better, and not require me to switch to a web-based editor. I’m going to have to learn some HTML and CSS anyway.
(I phrase this as if it were a brilliant flash of insight on my part. No, it’s something I started in July and then procrastinated on until now, when my Wordpress has been down for months.)
(And then procrastinated another 2 years for good measure.)
A vaguely relevant
issue just
steered me to the existence of
TRAMP which allows me to edit
remote files in Emacs. I just did C-x C-f
/ssh:username@whatever.com:/home/username from a stock Emacs
installation, and now I’m happily editing this Markdown file, which is
on my VPS, from my local Emacs. For some reason, I find this
incredibly awesome, even though things like remote X, NX, RDP, and
sshfs have been around for quite some time now. (When stuff starts
screwing up, M-x tramp-clean-up-all-connection seems to help a bit.)
I collect lots of notes and I enjoy writing and explaining, so why don’t I maintain a blog where I actually post more often than once every 18 months? I don’t really have a good answer. I just know that this crosses my mind about once a week. But okay, Steve Yegge, you get your wish but only because I found what you wrote about C++ to be both funny and appropriate.
2020 note: I’m now moving to Hugo! Hello, 2013-procrastinating me! Yes, Hakyll was neat but now I’m a bit sick of it and just really want some basic things to be easy for me again (like a photo gallery) given that I hate web stuff like crazy.
(Did you know my old Wordpress is still up? It’s 13 years old at this point.)