The previous version of this site was running using Bludit. It’s blogging software that runs without a database, instead storing everything in flat files. It reminded me a lot of blosxom, which I used back in college when my main desktop was FreeBSD and I was actually still using an external dial-up modem. In the current era where webdev is all about scale and everything has to be deployed to the cloud with multiple layers of redundancy, the simplicity of just a web server, php and some simple text files is appealing.
How can you reduce complexity from that setup? How about a completely static site. I started looking into Jekyll a little while ago, but since there wasn’t a migration tool in place to export from Bludit, I was too lazy to follow through. I had a little bit of time over the last holiday weekend, so I wrote a quick ruby script to pull the files from bludit, copy them into the proper place and generate the minimum amount of metadata that the posts require. There’s probably still some stuff that’s broken, but I think most of the content made it’s way over.
One of the most puzzling parts of the setup process was that although Jekyll supports tagging, it doesn’t actually generate the HTML for displaying the tagged info. I started writing a plugin, but then realized that pretty much everyone using Jekyll seems to have had this issue. Some kind soul has some code that you can drop in as a plugin, which will generate all of the required pages. Why this isn’t part of Jekyll to begin with is unclear to me.
It’s in the page footer, but just to make a note, the theme is stolen from over here. After going through pages and pages of themes, this one honestly seemed like the best.