New Blog

My blog setup has bothered me for some time. Now I have finally finished the replacement! Previously this blog ran on an outdated version of WordPress. Now its just a bunch of HTML files, generated from Markdown with a few scripts, served statically from Apache.

The main problem with the old blog was the spam. I would get hundreds of moderation requests every day. In the new blog I use Disqus to handle the comments instead. It's a free service that lets you add comments to any page, including static ones! They also support importing from WordPress.

I didn't use the editing features in WordPress much since I usually wrote my posts in Emacs before putting them on the blog. Now that I have no need for the dynamic features anymore, I can replace my blog by a bunch of static HTML files. Which I just did.

By serving static files I have less security issues to worry about. The fewer packages I have to keep up to date the better, and now I can cross PHP, MySQL, and WordPress off the list. Should I want to move the blog to a new server it is easy to do: just copy the files.

This new blog has actually been in the works for quite some time. I started working on it maybe two or three years ago, but I never managed to finish it until now. It is a hack, but it works the way I like it. It's built with

• Markdown files for the post texts
• JSON files for blog and post meta-data
• Mustache template files
• SASS style sheets
• a few Bash and Python scripts
• a few command line tools: mustache and jq
• and a Makefile.

Once I have cleaned up the blog code some more, I will wrap it up in a git repository and push it to GitHub. There are a few more changes that I should really make, like adding feeds, but I believe this is good for now. Most importantly, I removed the obstacle that kept me from writing for so long.

Update: The blog code is now available on GitHub.

Update: This site now has an Atom feed.

# raek