Blog? A couple of weeks ago, following the death of Parse.com, I wrote a rant about the virtues of portability and how they are too often overlooked. Posting that rant on a system that inherently does not allow portability (facebook, medium, etc.) felt a bit wrong. So, following a New Year’s resolution to better document my work, a blog seemed in order.
Blob? Developer blogs usually have a wise ass name. This Blob is no different. Some rationalizations:
- “an indeterminate mass or shape” : I’m not committing to a specific theme. Tech rant will probably rule but an occasional hummus recipe or fabrication tutorial might appear.
- “binary large objects” : Same as above but in geek terminology. Anything can be represented as a binary object.
- Yes. Blob sounds like Blog.
Jekyll is a bullet proof, dead simple and open source static site generator. In comes markdown - out comes a static website. The output, being simple html, can be hosted virtually anywhere. As a bonus, github pages will build and host your jekyll website free of charge.
Comments are a bitch. They add dynamic content to an otherwise beautifully static website. The de-facto industry standard is disqus but using that means someone else owns your discussion. It also means user session data is shared and no anonymous comments are allowed. In comes isso - an opensource, self hosted alternative to disqus. I love the idea of having sqlite as a datastore and, let’s face it, the ammout of expected comments (~1 per year) does not justify a multi-connection database solution. I’m running isso on a VM in an undisclosed location in the world…
Design - I’m slowly developing a hatred for beautiful web pages. Everything on the web is just too God damn pretty these days. I decided to get rid of all of Jekyll’s styling and start from scratch. I like fixed width fonts and I’m taking cues from Florent Verschelde’s monospace theme on tumblr and remarkdow css library. My css file is currently 10 lines long but will probably grow when richer content is added. I’m also using a solarized bright css for code highlighting and isso’s default css with minor modifications. UPDATE: Travis pointed out motherfuckingwebsite.com which is spot on.
The code is available here.