If you’re reading this, I finally got my act together and shifted this blog over from Publify (Née Typo) to a static site generated by Hugo.

I wish I’d done it earlier.

I also wish I’d not decided that Textile was the right lightweight markup language for me back in 2003 when I started this blog and that I’d not used platform specfic techniques for code highlighting. Converting all that to Github Flavoured Markdown was a bear, massively helped by pandoc and some very hacky text munging in Perl. Some stuff is still looking very ugly though; I chopped and changed my code formatting over the years, so as time and inclination allows, I’ll try and get stuff fixed by hand.

Why move?

The straw that broke this camel’s back was when I updated Publify and Ruby and spent the next few hours wrestling with Apache and Passenger trying to get the site back up. When the error messages told me that things weren’t working because I didn’t have a javascript runtime installed on my host, I knew that the time had come to just go with a system of files in a directory, served up by a simple minded webserver.

No comments

This first pass at migration has eliminated all the comments. They’re still in my database, but I’ve not worked out how to get them imported into the site’s structure yet. Again, as time and inclination allows, I’ll try and port them over. Who knows, I might even add Disqus comments to the site and let someone else deal with the pain of spam management.

Blogging schedule

I’m making no promises about restarting blogging I’m afraid. The shift to static generation has been an itch I’ve needed to scratch and, as I was building another site with Hugo anyway, now seemed like the opportune moment to move things over.