Classic blunder: write a post on a long neglected blog about committing to post more…

Like I said, the lack of the “perfect” blogging system played a big role in my dearth of writing…

The inability for me to “own” my content on Tumblr made me uncomfortable. Every time I log in there I am forced to look at a timeline of stuff I just don’t care about. So, I needed something new.

But one of the fundamental aspects of Tumblr appeals to me: a “tumblelog” of mixed media types. I want options to post one off images, essays, links, etc., with custom templates for a given type.

I also want a static blog, mostly for simplicity of maintenance and choice of tools (e.g. git and vim). But for some reason almost every static blog generator has one big assumption: every post needs a title. Not really compatible with tumblelogging!

So, I’ve essentially hacked together a solution of some Python scripts and Hugo. Hugo has the nice functionality of different post types so I can still have my tumblelog. It claims that titles are required metadata but my custom theme seems to work fine without them. I’ve given every post a UTC timestamp as the slug so that gives me a nice URL space. I’m considering migrating all of my tweets over here as well.

For hosting I am still using NearlyFreeSpeech for super cheap Apache hosting (~$20 a year). It works fine for now though it isn’t exactly snappy. I think I will eventually move over to S3 but it will be a bit of a hassle translating my mod_rewrite rules to their proprietary system. All URL paths going back to my cpanra.org days should correctly redirect to the new timestamp paths, though if anyone on the internet has ever linked to this blog, no search engine knows about it…

I’m writing these posts in vim, but I still need to tweak my configuration a bit. I’m using VimPencil for it’s handy writing utilities but it doesn’t play nicely with Hugo’s front matter. I think I need to define a new syntax region in the vim Markdown settings to convince VimPencil not to expect Markdown…

tap tap tap… Anybody there?

So, here it is. I’ve kept to my word so now it’s time for a new blog. I’m embarrassed to say this has been a project 6 years in the making.

Let’s just say I’ve been busy.

Sadly not having the “perfect” blogging system has caused me to essentially stop writing. Well, hopefully that can start changing…