a new blog engine

When I started this calendar year, I was pretty optimistic about how much teaching and creativity I would have, and I started trying to collect some doodads at a blog. I was being a university person, and I started at a university-supported blog. But it turns out that I'm not continuing as a university person, so now I have to do those things differently.

If I'm going to rescue the handful of things that I've posted there, I'm going to have to run some sort of a tool that will let me post them in a simple way. And also: I really want to be able to pop things up on the web without a lot of fuss. But I don't want to get tied to any particular server architecture. So I have spent today looking at various tools for generating blogs or websites as static file collections from some version-control-friendly set of text files. I think that I've settled on one, and I'm writing this post to sort it out.

I spent enough time and learned enough things that I should actually write them down carefully, so that Future Rob and his confusticated peers can benefit from my time spent. I'm actually better set up to produce such notes than I remembered when I started this post, because I did my testing in a git repository.

The goal of this web framework is to have a few different computers where I can pop things onto the web fairly rapidly — from a terminal, preferably.

For starting on this next time, I generated the new post with

    $ nikola new_post -d -t "a new blog engine" -f markdown -e

I'm going to move my notes to a dedicated page.