Digital Sundries

There is always the question why I have a website. The short answer is that I like to tinker with the technology. Don't really ever do anything serious with it I just like to tinker.

Point in case it's been about two years since I've done much with this site. I got the urge to simplify things for that very reason. There's not much sense in leaving it up and not keeping up with the security updates on something like wordpress. That is a recipe for disaster. So after thinking about it for awhile I started looking for something simpler.

I've messed with pico some but that still leaves php running and serving the pages. I tinkered with some but wasn't really satisfied with leaving anything dynamic running on a site that I only check sporadically. That got me to thinking that I might just go in and hand code the pages and just leave it all static. A few years ago that was how I kept it. I had written perl scripts that would take markdown files in a set directory structure apply a theme and viola it spit out static pages that were all linked together and could be ftp'ed to the server.

That started an adventure of searching through old backups and old hard drives looking for the scripts that I used. I found some of it but as with all old projects of mine I'm sure at the time it made perfectly good sense but now I was scratching my head. I'm sure I could have figured it all out again but I didn't really want to spend that much time on it. I just wanted to convert the posts that I wanted to keep to static pages and put them back up on the server. So I decided that I couldn't have been the only person who ever had this idea and little bit of time with google and I discovered Jekyll.

Jekyll does exactly what all of my old perl scripts did only better. So after a few days of messing with the layout and trying to get things like I want them this is the inaugural post. I will be messing with it for awhile and getting all of the old posts that I want migrated over then I can publish it and officially retire Wordpress.

Of course as I've worked with Jekyll since it uses plain text files for the posts it's become obvious that there are places that just beg to have some scripted automation to add to the ease of use. So I will be writing a few short perl scripts to help with creating a properly named stub for posts and things like that.