I’ve been running neglected blogs for a while now. Initially, I was using Blogger to post news for a club at university. Later I blogged notes about a research project, my honours topic, and assorted other stuff I was doing. When I started studying education, I started another blog about it. Eventually, I bought a domain, signed up for hosting, installed Wordpress and imported all those old posts.
I’ve posted off and on since then but it’s been sporadic and rather lacklustre.
At least part of this was due to the tedium of using my cobbled-together blogging platform of Wordpress with a bunch of plugins. Combining the built-in Wordpress formatting with Markdown, a number of syntax highlighting solutions and two or three other filters didn’t make for the easiest or more reliable system.
Now, though, I’m taking the next step and jumping on the semi-custom blog software bandwagon (and the static site bandwagon, and the Ruby bandwagon while I’m at it). I’ve replaced my old Wordpress blog with a static site generated with Jekyll from Markdown source.
I wasted ages – months and months – pretending to write my own system in Haskell, but I was just lying to myself. I gave in and chose Jekyll as system I’d heard good things about (in a language I’d heard good things about). Then I wasted more months pretending to design my own layout, but I was still lying to myself. Tonight I admitted that I was never going to finish and decided to use Mark Reid’s excellent and open source design, at least to start with.
A few hours later, and it’s done. I’ve pared Mark’s templates down a little so that they fit my content, run it through Jekyll, and now it’s live.
In the not too distant future (read: never) I intend to modify the design and make it my own. In the mean time, enjoy the content.