pages tagged ikiwikirohieb.namehttps://rohieb.name/blag/tag/ikiwiki/rohieb.nameikiwiki2013-11-05T01:07:48ZNew Blag, yay!https://rohieb.name/blag/post/new-blog-yay-/rohieb
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2013-11-05T01:07:48Z2013-10-27T01:21:56Z
<p>Sooo. You might already have noticed that I moved my <a href="http://xkcd.com/148/">blag</a> from
<a href="http://rohieb.wordpress.com">wordpress.com</a> to my own domain. There were several reasons for that,
which also kept me from blogging actively. At first, WordPress seemed like a
good solution for beginners, and since I didn’t want to set up my own (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress#Vulnerabilities">probably
buggy</a>) instance, a hosted blog at WordPress.com seemed like the best
solution to get started with blogging.</p>
<p>However, the free plan at WordPress.com does not allow very much customization:
you can choose from a few themes, but you can neither edit the underlying <abbr
title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> framework of the page, nor is is
possible to do a little <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>
tweaking. For example, I like my <code><code></code> tags with a little
darker background so they become more distinguished from the remaining text and
so you can easily see what you have to type on your keyboard and what not. </p>
<p>Also, I had to write blogposts in my browser. I’m not a big fan of the idea that
the browser should become an “operating system” for the <strike>web</strike>
cloud. My computer is more than a dumb terminal for the web, I like my terminals
and my offline applications and distributed workflows. In most cases, I find
distributed workflows much more flexible, and you can choose if and when you
want to lose control over your data to the cloud. And, without question, I lost
more than one draft to browser crashes (admittedly, Firefox got a lot more
stable since then), accidentally closed tabs and timed out login sessions. And
WordPress tends to be overloaded with complex page layouts and JavaScript, which
makes everything soooo slooooow…</p>
<p>So it seemed obvious to move my blog to my existing site, which already runs on
<a href="http://ikiwiki.info">ikiwiki</a>. For those who do not know ikiwiki, it is a static site generator
which takes <a href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax">Markdown</a>[^1] files as input and spits out static HTML pages. It
works good in combination with <a href="http://git-scm.com">Git</a> (a distributed version control system,
which I use all day anyway), which makes it possible to write and preview every
page on your own computer, using your favourite editor, offline (in fact I’m
writing this post from a laundrette), and when everything is finished (and you
have Internet access), you push it to your server, where everything is rendered.
There is also <a href="http://ikiwiki.info/blog/">an easy way</a> to aggregate multiple pages to a blog,
including the automatic generation of RSS and Atom feeds. Also I have full
control over the <a href="https://rohieb.name/local.css">CSS</a> (which will probably still change in the next
few weeks) and the <a href="https://rohieb.name/templates/">templates</a> used to render the HTML files. For example, I
have hacked together a <a href="http://git.rohieb.name/www-rohieb-name.git/blob/HEAD:/plugins/IkiWiki/Plugin/flattrthing.pm">little plugin</a> to support Flattr buttons
and integrated it into the template which is used to render the blog posts.
There is even a dynamic part of ikiwiki which allows users to add comments, I
may or may not try that in the future and convert all the WordPress comments.
And finally, if you want, you can read the full <a href="http://git.rohieb.name/www-rohieb-name.git">source code</a> of every page
<img src="https://rohieb.name/smileys/smile.png" alt=":-)" /></p>
<p>The move to ikiwiki was already in my head a long time, so I started writing new
blogposts in Markdown right away, so they started piling up on my disk. Now that
I have the new setup, I already have content to fill the next few weeks, so stay
tuned!</p>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> In this process I was also moving the site to a new server, which
also provides IPv6 connectivity:</p>
<pre><code>$ dig -t AAAA rohieb.name
; <<>> DiG 9.8.4-rpz2+rl005.12-P1 <<>> -t AAAA rohieb.name
;; global options: +cmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 64670
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 1, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0
;; QUESTION SECTION:
;rohieb.name. IN AAAA
;; ANSWER SECTION:
rohieb.name. 2629 IN AAAA 2a03:4000:2:2f3::1
;; Query time: 3 msec
;; SERVER: 192.168.148.1#53(192.168.148.1)
;; WHEN: Tue Oct 29 04:33:03 2013
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 57
</code></pre>
<p>[^1]: Though I’m using <a href="https://rawgithub.com/fletcher/human-markdown-reference/master/index.html">MultiMarkdown</a> for most pages, which is a superset of
Markdown with additional features (like footnotes). But ikiwiki also
supports other markup languages, e.g. <a href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a> or <a href="http://textile.sitemonks.com/">Textile</a>.</p>