New Blog 2021

I’ve not only stopped writing things on the blog, I also stopped updating its various workings, styles, etc. Time to change the latter, and see if it leads to the former. Knowing life, it probably won’t.

Why not WordPress?

WordPress has served me well since 2006. 15 years? Not bad – there are few things with this longevity in my computers. But I’ve grown afraid of it:

• The interface keeps changing. I’m old and don’t like it when interfaces improve.
• Everything is stored in MySQL. Fine, I can take a mysqldump every now and then? But what can I do with it really? And I have to actually keep running a MySQL server! If WordPress were able to use SQLite, I might’ve stuck with it.
• PHP, WordPress… guess how often I updated them? Yes – how didn’t everything get hacked yet?

Why Jekyll?

I like versioning things with git. I like simplicity. I like plain text files I can just edit. Digital restraint or hipsterism?

I’ve used Middleman in the past, and now can’t update my tsumego website. Apparently my Ruby is too new for my dependencies, so I update the dependencies, and then run into a Thor issue, which also is tracked on Debian and Ubuntu, and I really don’t care about any of this and just want things to work. Jekyll seems to continue working. I hope it continues working for the next 10 years at least. And if it breaks, I’ve got everything in relatively plain html/markdown files and should be able to take it from there.

Comments

Your wonderful comments were often much more interesting than my posts, and I worked hard to preserve them. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how to make commenting possible without suck. Some options:

1. Disqus, Facebook, etc: yes it’s easy, but where is the simplicity? I wanted more control and predictability and safe feelings, using a centralized third party to handle your precious comments would be downright irresponsible.
2. The Jekyll resources page lists some options that allow commenting using GitHub issues: I quite like that a bit, but the end result looks dodgy – each commenter has to agree to give some random app the write access to their soul.
3. The poor-man solution. As this is mirrored on GitHub anyway, just go and create a PR to add a comment? It’s not exactly user friendly, but hey, at least there’s a barrier to entry. I’ve written down instructions how to add comments. If GitHub ever goes away, the comments will be part of the repo and I can take them elsewhere. That, plus no one comments here anymore anyway.