Posted Sunday, 23 May 2010
In short, I got sick of Wordpress and stopped writing altogether. I evaluated Hyde and HiSlain briefly before I decided that I needed to write my own static HTML generator engine that behaves exactly the way I want it to. Hyde's bloated and has too many features I don't care about, and HiSlain's looks like it's written in C#. So I wrote rejourn in half a week. It has two main differentiators:
- Post headers- every post begins with a small header section which contains properties like title, author, pubdate etc. So if I want to remove certain a post, I can just open it up, set draft to true and rebuild.
- Build system uses GNU Make- it's not my favorite build system, but it does the job. Using this build system has several advantages: for example, the whole website can be rebuilt by invoking make from ViM/ Emacs without extra configuration. Ofcourse, when I write a new post, only that post and the index are rebuilt.
I also bought static HTML hosting from NFSN for pennies- thanks to their SSH support, my workflow's reduced to writing, saving, make'ing, and pushing via Magit. On the remote server, I have a bare repository with a detached work tree that runs "git checkout -f" as a post-receive hook.
Dumping most of my older posts, I imported a few good posts from my Wordpress blog, but I haven't figured out how to import the corresponding comments yet- I probably won't, and just leave it at that. Disqus is quite bloated, but there don't seem to be any alternatives :\
Unfortunately, the design's ripped off from Steve Losh's site (sorry Steve!), but I'll hopefully make some changes in future and find a way to credit him for the nice minimalistic design.
As far as future plans for rejourn are concerned, I still have to figure out a system for attaching files and displaying images inline. I'm also planning to clean up the codebase and remove references to local directories so everyone can use it- it's currently quite a hacky mess. More importantly, this should help me stop procrastinating writing.