Paul Hammant's Blog: New Blog Technology and Hosting

Bye bye Subversion

Git is the place to be these days. I have been a happy Subversion patron from version 0.7 onwards, but the last couple of years of Git usage have been a power-up that makes it increasing hard to use Subversion.

Bye bye Sitemesh

Sitemesh is about 11 years old now and at version 3, and still an incredible tool for Java web apps. It requires a constantly running JVM though which is not cheap. There have been to make it work offline like XSite. Jekyll has been made for static site solutions and it is all that I need. Chatting to Joe Walnes (the architect of Sitemesh), I found out that he likes the same tool-chain outlined here for his static sites.

Interestingly, Tom Preston-Warner suggests that Jekyll ‘was primarily inspired by a Ruby project called Webby’, and that he himself had not heard of Sitemesh at the time of Jekyll’s creation. It is funny how things go; Long gone are the days that it was possible to know everything that is relevant in the world of software development.

Bye bye KompoZer (and WYSIWYG HTML editing)

Textile and Markdown are nearly as good as a WYSIWYG editor, for the type of publishing I am concerned with. Though I’m a Junior committer for KompoZer on SourceForge, I am not going to use it for blog editing any more.

Hello GitHub-pages

GitHub pages is incredible. I have been a fan for a year now, and my last blog entry was about it. I have managed to preserve all my old article in the migration. I did a git-svn checkout (keeping history is important to me) and a git-push into GitHub. All my old URLs work, though the ATOM feed has changed. Too many people botch their blog conversions totally, or lamely supply a forwarding link.

For twenty or so blog entries, I ran html2textile to make textile. It was not perfect, as the in-line code examples gets chewed up, and I have had to preprocess my HTML with some perl-one-liners to remove evidence my apparent love of   I have cloned a minimal layout by Yuya Saito, and dropped much of the bling that my old Sitemesh decorator added.

Old Blog entries

They are preserved here. Google will index them, and otherwise preserve their pagerank, but they have disappeared from my Atom feed now.

Conclusion

Of course thousands of folks before me have settled on github-pages, so I am not trying to highlight anything new here. I think that anyone technical should look to this platform for hosting of mixed reference and blog materials, including project documentation, small company web sites and where Wiki or CMS solutions might have been used in the past.