Intro

I've long had an interest in starting up a simple blog for the purpose of documenting various projects on which I'm working. So it seems that the first thing I should blog about is the process of choosing and configuring blogging software.

Hand-coded HTML

I started posting things on the web when I was in college where every page was hand-crafted HTML and dumped in ~/public_html/ of my account on the Computer Science web server (I believe it started as a DEC ULTRIX, but then became a Red Hat box) and everything went live thanks to Apache running mod_userdir. Even before using HTML, I frequently used WordPerfect 5.1's "Reveal Codes" ability to inspect the control tags/codes used by the document which saved me much grief. I still prefer HTML over modern markup competitors like Markdown, Textile, or reST because HTML's tags are consistent. When trying the other markup languages, I frequently get stung by entering text that turns out to mean something to the markup engine, and when I reach for some of the more powerful features (tables, acronyms, code blocks, etc), I have to go to the reference materials every single time to make sure I get it correct. In HTML, all markup consists of an opening < followed by a closing >, and entities are always escaped with &. Consistent—the way I like it.

However, any time I wanted to change the look and feel of the site, I had to touch every single file (at least those that I cared about) and I also had to remember to update any index pages every time I added or renamed a page.

Server Side Includes

At some point, I explored using Server side includes to make the site look more uniform. While it was a bit of a hassle, it had the advantage that I could update the look of the site by changing a couple included files. I still had to manually update indexes, but it was a step in the right direction. Again, for deployment, since my college server was running Apache with mod_include installed,

Dynamic blogging platforms

Then blogging platforms such as Wordpress and Drupal came along with dynamic sites backed by a database. These held a lot more promise, allowing me to maintain my content and site theme independently.

Static Site Generators

Finally, static site generators have grown in popularity. They allow for lower server demands, a smaller attack-surface, and a separation of the content from the structure it populates and its . This site has been created with Nikola, a static site generator developed in Python.