I'm pretty sure that there are no long-term readers of this blog
for two principal reasons: 1) I rarely writeblog entries anymore, and
2) all of the old entries I did write are gone. At least for now,
Folks, I've struggled with a shameful problem for years – I'm
too damned stubborn to just make a WordPress.com account and be done
with it. I've self-hosted my blog for years and years now, and I
can't bring myself to just give up on it. I've tried about 10 different
packages for blogging, most recently PivotX and WordPress, and I always
run into some kind of problem with them. Whether it's the long-term
problem with TinyMCE not working properly in Firefox, rendering
WordPress useess unless I want to try and patch it myself, which means
that you're then out-of-sync with the official releases and update,
or problems with comment spam, or whatever, I keep being disappointed
by the popular options out there. I'm prepared to accept that it's not
them, it's me, but that doesn't really help me.
Well, no more. I've moved to a Python-based package called Pelican,
which parses HTML and Markdown and several other text formats and
produces a simple set of plain old HTML files that can be easily
uploaded. It's not fancy, but it just freaing works. i'm sold. No
messing around with SQL or HTML text editors or any of that nonsense.
I'm as happy as a pig in slop.
There's only one small problem: content. Some of my older entries
are just plain lost. (Sue me, I'm not diligent with my backups.) Some
of them can be recovered from the SQL tables in which they live and
put into Pelican. I'm going to do that, but I don't know how long that
will take since I have a family and a job and everything. I guess there
are two take-home lessons here: 1) I'm a kind of crappy blogger, and 2)
There's nothing wrong with doing things the simple way. So, that's just
what I'm going to do.
