Blogging with Less
2009
A little over two years ago, I started blogging on this website as a way to help fellow developers and get my name out in the community. The experience has made me a better developer and writer. What it has also taught me is the tedious and boring tasks of maintaining and using a blog engine.
This site was powered by BlogEngine.Net, but no more. I have freed myself from the need for blogging software to serve up mostly static pages. In addition, I have also jettisoned the poor WYSIWYG editors that never give you What you see, and do so at the expense of horrendous HTML.
I’ve begun a new journey with the help of plain text, Jekyll, Textile, Pygments, Git, and Rake where we go is anyones guess. Most, if not all, of these are new to me and I am guessing new to you also. Don’t be alarmed, it’s going to be great, trust me.
What’s so great about plain text and jekyll?
I have been programming for the web a long time and whenever I wanted to change the structure of my blog I had all this infrastructure in my way. So changing the blog was just something I never did. Jekyll is different; it is a web site generator that works with templates, textile post files and Ruby code. With Jekyll and TextMate, I can change the whole site in a matter of minutes, upload the new version using a handy Rake task all before breakfast on a slow day.
I know that most of you are shocked and appalled that this M$ Kool-Aid drinker is using Ruby and serving up plain html without using a database.
The fact is, I think the less amount of software between me and a blog post the better. BlogEngine is a great OSS project, please don’t take my exiting the fold as a bad review. I don’t need the help or features that a blog engine provides and if you’re reading my blog, I doubt you need them either.
Introductions
- Jekyll Ruby website generator hotness.
- Pygments python code colorizer from Ada to Zen.
- Git distributed source control.
- Rake productivity and build system.
- DISQUS comments anyone.
- Textile less angle bracket tax.
Conclusion
I hope you will journey with me, jekyll and company, as we explore blogging with less friction. With less infrastructure. With just less. I know that this will enable me to blog at a more regular pace while not dreading touching the site. A word of warning for you Microsofties some Ruby, Objective-C and Python are coming your way.
