written on Friday, January 7, 2011
I can't recall the exact number of times, but it's been many. I tried many times to start a blog, some of those even trying to build a whole blog system myself. Every time I tried I posted some 5 stories, or even just two (or just one) before running out of things to write about (or time to write about it) and leaving my blog unchanged for a long period of time before pulling it off-line and starting over. I'm not saying this time will be different.
This time I'm not writing my own blog software. What I'm using isn't even real blog software in the normal way blog software works. This blog is powered by the software behind Armin Ronacher's blog called rstblog. This software is installed on my laptop and works by translating reStructuredText into a plain HTML website. With a blog like the ones I normally write on (once or twice) it's not really necessary to have a whole relational database coupled to Wordpress or something similar just to have 90% of the functionality of the software unused, 1 or 2 functions I really want or need missing from that, and a codebase so huge and/or complicated that I can't be bothered to try to build a plugin.
def sharing_code_snippets(just, works):
print "Which is convenient, "
return {
'why': [
'Because I write code',
'and like to share my thoughts about it'
],
'how': "It's a feature!",
}
Implementing new features for this software shouldn't be too hard either: the code is on github, it's written by someone who knows how to write readable code, and it's moderately-sized.
Adding a post (or a page) is as simple as creating a .rst file in the right directory, and re-building after you're done editing. The built site is ready to be previewed on any machine capable of running the build script, and when you're happy with the result the HTML files and required resources (images, css) are in a single folder you can upload to your server which only needs to run a web-server, and any flavour will do, because it's only static content.
So this will be the place I write about programming, in Python, Go, C or whatever language I'll use. This place I'll write about hacking, and other software-related problems. This place I might even write about embedded systems, which is another of my interests: embedded software and electronics.