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diff --git a/build/blog/2015-05-05-new-blog-new-start.html b/build/blog/2015-05-05-new-blog-new-start.html new file mode 100644 index 00000000..1524757e --- /dev/null +++ b/build/blog/2015-05-05-new-blog-new-start.html @@ -0,0 +1,74 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html> +<html> +<head> +<meta charset="utf-8"/> +<meta content="pandoc" name="generator"/> +<meta content="Zhiming Wang" name="author"/> +<meta content="2015-05-05T02:42:44-07:00" name="date"/> +<title>New blog, new start</title> +<link href="/img/apple-touch-icon-152.png" rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed"/> +<meta content="#FFFFFF" name="msapplication-TileColor"/> +<meta content="/img/favicon-144.png" name="msapplication-TileImage"/> +<meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" name="viewport"/> +<link href="/css/normalize.min.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> +<link href="/css/theme.css" media="all" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"/> +</head> +<body> +<div id="archival-notice">This blog has been archived.<br/>Visit my home page at <a href="https://zhimingwang.org">zhimingwang.org</a>.</div> +<nav class="nav"> +<a class="nav-icon" href="/" title="Home"><!--blog icon--></a> +<a class="nav-title" href="/"><!--blog title--></a> +<a class="nav-author" href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank"><!--blog author--></a> +</nav> +<article class="content"> +<header class="article-header"> +<h1 class="article-title">New blog, new start</h1> +<div class="article-metadata"> +<time class="article-timestamp" datetime="2015-05-05T02:42:44-07:00">May 5, 2015</time> +</div> +</header> +<p>Octopress has been serving me for the past six months, during which even Octopress itself underwent major changes — in fact, <a href="https://github.com/octopress/octopress/releases/tag/v3.0.0">Octopress 3.0.0</a> was only released 3 days ago, which I never got to try. Anyway, Octopress's heavily colored interface grew old on me fairly quickly. I'm especially unhappy with the inline <code><code></code> tag, which is always wrapped in a white box and stands out too much (worse still, there's no visual difference when such a <code><code></code> tag is placed inside an <code><a></code> tag). Since I use inline code/verbatim a lot, many of my articles were littered with arbitrary boxes everywhere.</p> +<div class="figure"> +<a href="https://i.imgur.com/hxfSnOk.png" target="_blank"><img alt="Farewell, Octopress." src="https://i.imgur.com/hxfSnOk.png"/></a> +<p class="caption">Farewell, Octopress.</p> +</div> +<p>Apparently I need something simpler. Because</p> +<blockquote> +<p>Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>But how? Simiplicity 101: get rid of the "platform". There's no reason why I need a blogging platform like Jekyll (let alone the WordPress monster). When I initially switched to Octopress, I thought code highlighting was something fancy that I need heavy machinery to achieve, but it turned out that Pandoc is battery-included when it comes to syntax highting,<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn1" id="fnref1"><sup>1</sup></a> so all I need is to specify a highlight style, e.g., Pygments:</p> +<pre><code>pandoc input.md --highlight-style=pygments --template template.html --output output.html</code></pre> +<p>That's it. Write the Markdown, compile with Pandoc, instantly awesome. So the HTML posts are there (assuming the HTML template is written, which is not hard to kick off).</p> +<p>The rest of the job is to design the stylesheets and compile the posts into a coherent blog — basically, generate an index. I was able to realize both in several hours. For the former task, I borrowed a lot from <a href="http://mort.ninja/">mort.ninja</a> by <a href="https://github.com/soimort">Mort Yao</a>. Interestingly, we were born in the same city (Nanjing, China), and I benefit from at least two of his open source projects: <a href="https://github.com/soimort/you-get">you-get</a> and <a href="https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell">translate-shell</a>. The latter task is more interesting but also not hard. I'm rolling my own toolchain in Python, which you can find in <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/zmwangx.github.io/blob/source/pyblog"><code>pyblog</code></a>. In fact, the complete source of this blog (down to how image assets are generated) are in the <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/zmwangx.github.io/tree/source"><code>source</code> branch</a> of my GitHub Pages repo, so you may take a look if you're interested. <code>pyblog</code> is highly specialized<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn2" id="fnref2"><sup>2</sup></a> and is still a work in progress at the time of writing, but it's already well capable of generating the blog — currently missing are auto gen-deploy and preview (with auto-update), which will also come soon.</p> +<p>By the way, the most annoying thing in the development process was working with XML and generating <a href="/atom.xml">the Atom feed</a>. Standard library <code>xml.etree.ElementTree</code> doesn't support the <code>![CDATA[</code> tag, and in the end I had to hack <a href="https://github.com/zmwangx/zmwangx.github.io/blob/source/pyblog#L34-L54">library internals</a>, which is likely to break in future versions. Remember the quotes?</p> +<blockquote> +<p>XML is a classic political compromise: it balances the needs of man and machine by being equally unreadable to both.</p> +</blockquote> +<blockquote> +<p>XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files.</p> +</blockquote> +<p>Sigh.</p> +<p>Anyway, here is my new shiny blog.</p> +<div class="figure"> +<a href="https://i.imgur.com/VS5f9eJ.png" target="_blank"><img alt="Welcome to the completely revamped dl? cmplnts?" src="https://i.imgur.com/VS5f9eJ.png"/></a> +<p class="caption">Welcome to the completely revamped dl? cmplnts?</p> +</div> +<p>It looks ten times better than Octopress, and ever builds much faster than Octopress<a class="footnoteRef" href="#fn3" id="fnref3"><sup>3</sup></a>. As a bonus, the codebase is so small that it's super trivial to hack (no, not <em>that</em> hack).</p> +<div class="footnotes"> +<hr/> +<ol> +<li id="fn1"><p>Well, Pandoc is heavy-machinery, but it's both generic and self-contained, unlike a specialized blogging platform.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref1">↩︎</a></p></li> +<li id="fn2"><p>Which is fine since I don't expect anyone else to use it, anyway.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref2">↩︎</a></p></li> +<li id="fn3"><p>I have the impression that a complete build of all posts (about fifty of them) with <code>pyblog</code> is faster than regenerating for a single modified post in Octopress. That's in the context of absolutely no categories; when you have a dozen or more categories, Octopress slows down to a halt.<a class="footnotes-backlink" href="#fnref3">↩︎</a></p></li> +</ol> +</div> +</article> +<hr class="content-separator"/> +<footer class="footer"> +<span class="rfooter"> +<a class="rss-icon" href="/rss.xml" target="_blank" title="RSS feed"><!--RSS feed icon--></a><a class="atom-icon" href="/atom.xml" target="_blank" title="Atom feed"><!--Atom feed icon--></a><a class="cc-icon" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" target="_blank" title="Released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license."><!--CC icon--></a> +<a href="https://github.com/zmwangx" target="_blank">Zhiming Wang</a> +</span> +</footer> +</body> +</html> |