Blog revival 2020

If anyone still had my long dormant blog in their RSS reader, they might have noticed my first post in five years (and my first post with actual content in even longer than that.) Looking at my posts, it is clear that

1. I started this blog using wordpress in 2004.
2. In 2011, I decided that a local wordpress installation was too insecure, and switched to octopress.
3. In 2015, I figured out how to post with octopress again.

Fast forward to 2019. The host that I serve this blog on was seriously old at this point (it had a Celeron!) The colo facility that we had this box in was looking at it with increasing suspicion. So we (finally) replaced it with newer hardware and a recent operating system with essentially a clean build. At this point, I decided that while I wasn’t really posting to this blog, I’d still like to keep it on the Internet. I went about getting Octopress working again. At this point I discovered:

1. Octopress was basically dead.
2. The new hotness was hugo. Hugo is the same concept as Octopress/Jeykll, but written in go.

I set about migrating the blog to Hugo. Given that both systems used Markdown documents as the content, porting was fairly easy. The majority of the porting effort was finding a new theme that I liked. Unfortunately, once I got the blog published, I then forgot about it again.

Now move one year forward. I had something that I nominally wanted to post, but realized that I didn’t remember how to actually create a post. Or even where I kept the blog source. Some poking around rediscovered both bits of knowledge. However, in the intervening year, my template had not kept up with updates to Hugo and no longer rendered entirely correctly. After wondering if I should just get a newer (albeit different) Hugo template for the blog, I hacked my existing theme to work again.

Interestingly enough, my entire workflow has largely changed even in the past year. After migrating to octopress, my basic workflow was to:

• Write the post in Emacs using “markdown-mode”, then preview it with Marked 2.

Today (while I still use emacs for some things), I largely just use Visual Studio Code. VSCode has an excellent Markdown mode, and is quite good at previewing Markdown.