May 08, 2009 - New Blog Layout

If you haven’t figured it out already (and chances are good you have), I dramatically changed the layout of my blog. The change came about for a few reasons, most seated in my innate fascination with minimalist things, and more generally in technology.

WordPress was working fine for me, but I had a few issues with it. Most of the features I didn’t use, and some of the features I wanted to turn off but couldn’t figure out how or couldn’t to the degree I wanted to (trackbacks were one such issue, as well as people having logins, which made no sense). Then there was the fact that the theme I had been using was actually a bandage I hacked up one day after ruining my previous theme. Managing it was difficult, and I lost a few features I actually wanted (pages and widgets).

Giving it deeper thought, I started to wonder what exactly I was after with a blog. It’s not so much a record of my life (“Today I went bike riding at…”) as much as a set of thoughts I have on pretty much anything. Records are better left to the microblogging and tumblelog services, which I think can capture “The Moment” better, or at least in a more interesting way. So if it’s a collection of thoughts, wouldn’t simple pages work just as well?

I was then introduced to a cool piece of free software called Jekyll. The software is similar to my “WST” program that I started writing a few years ago in that it performs text transclusion, but it does a much better and thorough job. Basically I can now keep my blog stored as a set of mostly plain text files inside a directory tree, which I then manage with Git. Writing a post means I write a new file using whatever editor I want to (I wrote this one in good ol’ Emacs), “recompile” the blog using Jekyll, and then use rsync to upload it to my webspace.

I don’t think it can get much more minimalist than that, unless I abandon all design and instead only post plain text files.

I’m sure there are going to be a few kinks to work out still, and I’d like to expand things a bit, but I think this will work out better in the long run. Now, I wonder if cron could be integrated into this mix…