About this blog

The technical part

There comes a time in most developers’ lives where they think “I should start a blog”. I too have had this thought before, and up until now it has ended in abject failure. But the time seemed right to give it another shot, and what better way to start than with a discussion of how the blog was built?

For starters, this blog was literally built in a day. There’s not much to it. I’m a fan of the recent movement to static sites, and this is indeed just such a site. In fact, not only is it static, there’s not even any Javascript. Not a single line of it. This isn’t because I have anything against it, it just isn’t necessary. This is a website with text on it, and the occassional picture. That’s it. It is responsive, however, and HTML 5-based.

As far as infrastructure for generating the static site, there’s not much there either. I took a cursory look at what was out there, and it all seemed far too elaborate and involved for my needs. As a result, this site is generated using a ~100 line Python script from a simple directory structure. I write posts in Markdown, invoke the script, pass it an output directory, and it builds the site there - copies over resources, inserts the posts into a page template, generates an index, and it’s done. All in all, I’m quite happy with it.

The content

My hope is to make this a general-purpose blog. It’ll certainly have technical content, but I’m hoping to also cover my adventures to South Carolina’s state parks, the occassional photo, song or video that I enjoy, ramblings on sundry subjects and whatever else strikes my fancy. I hope you enjoy it!