Introduction: about my new static blog set-up

2015-04-11

Every so often I regret having given up every blog I've started. Typically, I react by thinking about starting a new blog. Sometimes I do. And sometimes I even resurrect an old blog, of which there are several, dating all the way back to the early 2000s.

Past blogs, aside from the LiveJournal, had themes. Revolutionary politics. 2010 anti-iPad screeds. Open source software. Open source software in libraries. Criticism of video games journalism. Urban photographs of a green, elephant-shaped sippy cup.

This blog is a little bit different. From the outset it has a very limited goal: to be a space where I can write without having to worry about length or quality or even getting the HTML right.

I don't anticipate getting (m)any readers. I don't aim to. I only want a place to jot down those things about which I don't have enough to say to justify making a dedicated page on my website. News items. Observations. Musings. That kind of thing.

I should add that I used to have a page with the technical details of my blog. It was a pain to update every time I changed something. So, in short, here's the deal as of late 2017 on: this blog is written as very simple markdown files, from which HTML files are generated using the simple lowdown program. A real basic, hacky ksh script handles things like wrapping a header and footer around the post content, creating the index page, and creating HTML pages only when the corresponding markdown file has been created or updated.

So it's a real simple system, with pros and cons.

Pros

Light -- the whole system uses just a few dozen kilobytes of storage even with several posts up.
Virtually everything is done with the OpenBSD base system: vi, cp, mv, basename, ksh, and the like. lowdown, a very small, OpenBSD-friendly markdown program, is the only external dependency.
There are only static files served up with OpenBSD's simple httpd webserver daemon. No PHP, no MySQL, no Wordpress, no plugins.

Cons

I don't know how to add a comments system in a simple, self-hosted way.
I don't have RSS/Atom feeds. That's a shame because feeds are vital to the web.
It doesn't look very fancy.