Metablogging

Posted: Fri, 1 July 2011 | permalink | 5 Comments

I’ve taken the plunge, and converted my blog from a venerable but largely unmaintain(ed|able) blosxom setup that I’ve had since 2005 (OMG!) into a new and shiny Jekyll-backed system. The main benefits are that I’m more comfortable hacking away at Jekyll (being written in Ruby), and my blog post submission no longer requires me to e-mail my blog posts to myself to put them up (that was just an artifact of how I set it up all those years ago, but it had worked so I wasn’t willing to change it just for the sake of it).

Jekyll’s superior (for me) hackability has reaped dividends already – I’ve put together a home-grown comments system, which fulfils my primary requirements of being as close to completely statically-generated as it’s possible to be (about 10 lines of PHP is the only dynamic content), and doesn’t involve JavaScript or putting my blog comments “in the cloud”.

UPDATE: I’ve finally released my static comments plugin; the announcement blog post has more details of what it is and how it works.


5 Comments

From: Vincent Bernat
2011-07-02 08:40

Hi Matt!

Your RSS feed contains incorrect links (.html is missing).

From: Matt Palmer
2011-07-02 09:33

Hi Vincent,

Thanks for letting me know about the bodgy RSS feed; I’m still getting some of the kinks worked out (the CSS is still all over the place, for example).

I think the problem you were seeing was that the <guid> tag was being (mistakenly) interpreted as a permalink; I’ve set isPermalink=false and double-checked that the <link> tag does have a correct-looking extension.

Please let me know if it’s still looking wonky for you.

From: Morgan
2011-07-13 05:02

Howdy,

Any chance of getting the code for your comments system? It sounds like it meets my requirements, too.

From: Matt Palmer
2011-07-13 09:47

Hi Morgan,

I’m actually in the process of cleaning up the code and documenting it to my (possibly excessively fussy) standards before I put up a blog post all about it. I’ll prioritise it more highly, and hope to get it out by the end of the week.

From: Matt Palmer
2011-07-19 13:31

Hi Morgan,

It wasn’t quite “the end of the week”, but I’ve just released my static comments plugin (the announcement blog post has more gory details about how it works).

Post a comment

All comments are held for moderation; markdown formatting accepted.

This is a honeypot form. Do not use this form unless you want to get your IP address blacklisted. Use the second form below for comments.
Name: (required)
E-mail: (required, not published)
Website: (optional)
Name: (required)
E-mail: (required, not published)
Website: (optional)