Mercurial > public > pelican-blog
comparison content/Coding/000-blog-reboot.rst @ 4:7ce6393e6d30
Adding converted blog posts from old blog.
| author | Brian Neal <bgneal@gmail.com> |
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| date | Thu, 30 Jan 2014 21:45:03 -0600 |
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| 3:c3115da3ff73 | 4:7ce6393e6d30 |
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| 1 Blog reboot with Blogofile | |
| 2 ########################## | |
| 3 | |
| 4 :date: 2011-04-17 14:10 | |
| 5 :tags: Blogging, Blogofile | |
| 6 :slug: blog-reboot-with-blogofile | |
| 7 :author: Brian Neal | |
| 8 | |
| 9 Welcome to my new blog. I've been meaning to start blogging again for some time, especially since | |
| 10 the new version of SurfGuitar101.com_ went live almost two months ago. But the idea of dealing with | |
| 11 WordPress was putting me off. Don't get me wrong, WordPress really is a nice general purpose | |
| 12 blogging platform, but it didn't really suit me anymore. | |
| 13 | |
| 14 I considered creating a new blog in Django_, but I really want to spend all my time and energy on | |
| 15 improving SurfGuitar101 and not tweaking my blog. I started thinking about doing something | |
| 16 simpler. | |
| 17 | |
| 18 Almost by accident, I discovered Blogofile_ by seeing it mentioned in my Twitter feed. Blogofile is | |
| 19 a static blog generator written in Python. After playing with it for a while, I decided to use it | |
| 20 for a blog reboot. It is simple to use, Pythonic, and very configurable. The advantages for me to go | |
| 21 with a static blog are: | |
| 22 | |
| 23 1. No more dealing with WordPress and plugin updates. To be fair, WordPress is very easy to update | |
| 24 these days. Plugins are still a pain, and are often needed to display source code. | |
| 25 2. I can write my blog posts in Markdown_ or reStructuredText_ using my `favorite editor`_ instead | |
| 26 of some lame Javascript editor. Formatting source code is dead simple now. | |
| 27 3. All of my blog content is under version control. | |
| 28 4. Easier to work offline. | |
| 29 5. Easier to deploy. Very little (if any) server configuration. | |
| 30 6. I can use version control with a post-commit hook to deploy the site. | |
| 31 | |
| 32 Disadvantages: | |
| 33 | |
| 34 1. Not as "dynamic". For my blog, this isn't really a problem. Comments can be handled by a service | |
| 35 like Disqus_. | |
| 36 2. Regenerating the entire site can take time. This is only an issue if you have a huge blog with | |
| 37 years of content. A fresh blog takes a fraction of a second to build, and I don't anticipate | |
| 38 this affecting me for some time, if ever. I suspect Blogofile will be improved to include caching | |
| 39 and smarter rebuilds in the future. | |
| 40 | |
| 41 It should be noted that Blogofile seems to require Python 2.6 or later. My production server is | |
| 42 still running 2.5, and I can't easily change this for a while. This really only means I can't use | |
| 43 Mercurial with a *changegroup* hook to automatically deploy the site. This should only be a temporary | |
| 44 issue; I hope to upgrade the server in the future. | |
| 45 | |
| 46 Blogofile comes with some scripts for importing WordPress blogs. Looking over my old posts, some of | |
| 47 them make me cringe. I think I'll save importing them for a rainy day. | |
| 48 | |
| 49 The bottom line is, this style of blogging suits me as a programmer. I get to use all the same | |
| 50 tools I use to write code: a good text editor, the same markup I use for documentation, and version | |
| 51 control. Deployment is a snap, and I don't have a database or complicated server setup to maintain. | |
| 52 Hopefully this means I will blog more. | |
| 53 | |
| 54 Finally, I'd like to give a shout-out to my friend `Trevor Oke`_ who just switched to a static blog | |
| 55 for many of the same reasons. | |
| 56 | |
| 57 | |
| 58 .. _SurfGuitar101.com: http://surfguitar101.com | |
| 59 .. _Django: http://djangoproject.com | |
| 60 .. _Blogofile: http://blogofile.com | |
| 61 .. _Markdown: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ | |
| 62 .. _reStructuredText: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html | |
| 63 .. _favorite editor: http://www.vim.org | |
| 64 .. _Disqus: http://disqus.com/ | |
| 65 .. _Trevor Oke: http://trevoroke.com/2011/04/12/converting-to-jekyll.html |