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diff --git a/source/blog/2015-05-05-new-blog-new-start.md b/source/blog/2015-05-05-new-blog-new-start.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000..4fcdf0cb --- /dev/null +++ b/source/blog/2015-05-05-new-blog-new-start.md @@ -0,0 +1,42 @@ +--- +title: "New blog, new start" +date: 2015-05-05T02:42:44-07:00 +date-display: May 5, 2015 +--- +Octopress has been serving me for the past six months, during which even Octopress itself underwent major changes — in fact, [Octopress 3.0.0](https://github.com/octopress/octopress/releases/tag/v3.0.0) 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>` 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>` tag is placed inside an `<a>` tag). Since I use inline code/verbatim a lot, many of my articles were littered with arbitrary boxes everywhere. + + + +Apparently I need something simpler. Because + +> Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. + +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,[^pandoc] so all I need is to specify a highlight style, e.g., Pygments: + +[^pandoc]: Well, Pandoc is heavy-machinery, but it's both generic and self-contained, unlike a specialized blogging platform. + +``` +pandoc input.md --highlight-style=pygments --template template.html --output output.html +``` + +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). + +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 [mort.ninja](http://mort.ninja/) by [Mort Yao](https://github.com/soimort). Interestingly, we were born in the same city (Nanjing, China), and I benefit from at least two of his open source projects: [you-get](https://github.com/soimort/you-get) and [translate-shell](https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell). The latter task is more interesting but also not hard. I'm rolling my own toolchain in Python, which you can find in [`pyblog`](https://github.com/zmwangx/zmwangx.github.io/blob/source/pyblog). In fact, the complete source of this blog (down to how image assets are generated) are in the [`source` branch](https://github.com/zmwangx/zmwangx.github.io/tree/source) of my GitHub Pages repo, so you may take a look if you're interested. `pyblog` is highly specialized[^pyblog] 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. + +[^pyblog]: Which is fine since I don't expect anyone else to use it, anyway. + +By the way, the most annoying thing in the development process was working with XML and generating [the Atom feed](/atom.xml). Standard library `xml.etree.ElementTree` doesn't support the `, which is likely to break in future versions. Remember the quotes? + +> XML is a classic political compromise: it balances the needs of man and machine by being equally unreadable to both. + +> XML combines the efficiency of text files with the readability of binary files. + +Sigh. + +Anyway, here is my new shiny blog. + + + +It looks ten times better than Octopress, and ever builds much faster than Octopress[^speed]. As a bonus, the codebase is so small that it's super trivial to hack (no, not *that* hack). + +[^speed]: I have the impression that a complete build of all posts (about fifty of them) with `pyblog` 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. |