New Location, New Tools (redux)

by Aaron

Two years ago I posted that I had moved my blog from Blogger to some django based thing. Recently, I've moved to a different, even more custom, system. In the intervening time, I've written precisely fourteen and one-half blog posts. You may be thinking to yourself: "Surely, that means you spend more time working on your blog's software than actually, y'know, blogging". You would be right, it just turns out that I happen to like it that way.

The new engine is based around the idea of having all of the blog posts stored as reStructuredText documents and then generating all of the indexes/feeds/etc. as a build step producing a bunch of static HTML. This has a couple of neat effects:

  • The entire state of my blog can be stored in version control.
  • I can do all of my editing using my favourite text editor.
  • I can do silly things like running OptiPNG over every single image as a build step.
  • I can say: "My blog software is nginx1."
  • It has the highest YSlow score of anything I have ever worked on.
  • It has a development server (for realz).

Those might sound like the sort of the features that only a programmer could love, well it just so happens that I an one. Sure, this probably only works because (including the post about changing tools) I've only got something like fifteen and two-thirds blog posts, but it all makes more sense if you think of the blog posts I write as cleverly disguised unit tests for whatever blog software I'm working on at the time ;)

[1]It isn't actually. I use Apache just like everybody else. nginx just sounds cooler.