Blog update: December 31st, 2013

, Will Kahn-Greene | share this (mastodon)
Note: This is an old post in a blog with a lot of posts over a long span of time. The world has changed, technologies have changed, and I've changed. It's likely this is out of date, the code doesn't work, the ideas haven't aged well, or the ideas were terrible to begin with. Let me know if you think this is something that needs updating.

A few weeks ago, a friend of mine started a site called Nethack-a-day. It's fantastic---a Nethack game with color commentary one turn at a time. If you like Nethack, but haven't seen it, you're missing out.

As he was setting it up, he was looking at various systems he could build it with. I sort of wanted to say, "Yo, just use Pyblosxom." because I was pretty familiar with it (I spent the better part of 9 years maintaining it) and I knew it did 80% of what he needed. But I hesitated because I've been on the fence about switching to something else for a while now.

Then I committed a critical mistake. I said, "You know, Pyblosxom would be great for this, but how about I fix a handful of things first that'll make it easier to deal with." A handful of things turned into a massive overhaul of Pyblosxom ripping out a lot of the technical debt that had been accruing for years, re-imagining some of the bits I was never happy with and tweaking some things just because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Thus was born Douglas.

Douglas resembles many of the static site blog generator systems written in Python that exist. That suggests it was a silly idea to go and write it, but it has three compelling aspects that I think made it worth my time:

  1. It's derived from a blog system I maintained and thought about for a long time, so it has all the sorts of things I would want in a static blog generator

  2. I can continue to say, "I've been using the same blog system since 2002." Sure, it's not exactly the same system, but it's not like I have to go rewrite/reformat entries I wrote in 2002.

  3. It has a nicer callback system that I think makes it more malleable when it doesn't do exactly what you want by default.

Right now it's in an alpha state: the test suite doesn't cover enough of the software; the docs are mediocre and in some cases are filled with outright lies; there are a handful of issues; and there's still a bunch of technical debt and some architectural decisions that sucked and are increasingly difficult to work around.

Regardless, about a month, 102 commits and 9980 insertions and 22828 deletions later, I'm now switching my blog over to my new system. And that's how I'm going to end 2013.

Want to comment? Send an email to willkg at bluesock dot org. Include the url for the blog entry in your comment so I have some context as to what you're talking about.