polka dot blog

Well, it's official. The blog is up. It took so long because I was trying to find the ideal way to blog. I've had several blogs over time and they always fade into obscurity. The major reason is that they weren't easy to write. So I went looking for something that was.

You know what's easy to write? Text files. Of course text isn't really good for proper formatting. You lose nice features like lists and tables. That's what markup languages are good for. HTML/CSS do this but they're just too weird for writing natural language.

Enter Markdown. Though other text-based markup languages exist that are more natural, Markdown seems to be the one most commonly found across the Internet. Github uses it. Coursera forums use it. The list goes on.

So that takes care of the writing. But what about publishing? We have to turn it into the blog, with all the nice features of a common blog, including RSS feeds. We have to have RSS feeds. Comments, too! And that's where Blogofile comes in. Written in Python, it's a static website compiler using Mako templates.

Once you get the templates tweaked just the way you want, it's quite simple. You make a post in Markdown like so:

---
categories: testing
title: Hello World
date: 2014/10/29 16:11:23
---
Hello World

And then run blogofile build.

To make it super easy, put it under version control. Then publishing or even making major changes to the layout is just a push away. Haven't got to that yet, but I'm writing, and that's what counts.