Welcome to Jekyll!

August 27, 2016

I haven’t done any blogging in quite a while. This is partly because I’ve been running the tech blog at work, and partly because my blogging framework (that one I wrote for fun, but ended up looking a lot like Jekyll) depended on a machine that I had to decommission, and also started looking a lot like Jekyll, only not as reliable or feature-rich.

So I’ve switched to Jekyll. I was actually pretty surprised by the degree of similarity between my format and Jekyll’s. It tells me I didn’t exactly have the wrong idea about that bit.

Out of this whole thing, I’ve learned a few lessons.

Text-only, version controlled blogging is a good idea.Or at least, it sucks a lot less than WYSIWYG without change control!

Building your blogging framework around Rake is not such a good idea.Especially when you don’t really know Rake that well

It would have been great to learn more about Ruby gems when I was building, so I could have used them better. That said, Git submodules were not a complete waste of time.[Sure, but there’s usually a better tool for the job – Ed.]

The “view history” aspect of the whole idea is not as useful for me as it might be for some others. Nevertheless, it’s useful to think about.

I used to be pretty dumb about some of my predictions, and I was right on the money about some others. Jury’s still out on the rest.

I’m hoping that I’ll publish more if I’m using tools where I don’t feel the burden of maintaining them to quite the same degree. We’ll have to see.