Until today, this blog ran on vimblog, a hand-rolled minimal script for displaying blog entries. In the last year or so, though, I've become a convert to git, and so what I really want to do is edit my posts on any system, commit them to a git repository, push to a remote and have them end up as blog entries on my server. Fixing vimblog to do this would have been more work than I want to deal with, but thankfully ikiwiki exists, and can do most of what I need.

So, as of now, this blog is in ikiwiki. To get there, I followed (more or less, since I'm documenting after-the-fact) these steps:

more

Eugene found a bug in tagging, where specifying a tag made it appear multiple times. This is now fixed.

It looks like vimblog has another user. Welcome, Eugene.

I'm not sure why exactly, but I keep wanting to add more features to this silly blog script. It started out as just a quick, featureless flat-file based blog tool, written to a) let me maintain a blog with vim, and b) prove to myself that I can still write small, maintainable Perl hacks.

It's still small (under 500 lines, including all the HTML and CSS templates), but it has oh so many features:

• support for multiple content-types in posting (currently plain text, HTML, and Markdown)
• articles stored in plain text for easy editing
• per-post tagging, and sidebar tag cloud
• full-content RSS feed
• permalinks to individual articles
• configurable per-article link naming
• view articles by year, month, or day
• view articles by tag

I'm hoping I run out of stuff to add soon. One of my main goals is to keep this as a small one-file Perl script, and there's only so far you can go with that sort of limitation. If it gets any bigger, I may as well just give up and use Catalyst.

This post brought to you by vim, via: vim scp://colo.dmo.ca/.blog/entries/date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S" If that's not cool, I don't know what is.

The blog rewrite is now available via hg in the vimblog repository. If it confuses you, email me and I'll write some documentation.

Now with Markdown support

I wanted a command-line-editable blog, so in yet another fit of wheel reinvention, I rewrote bart's PHP blog in more maintainable Perl.

It still needs some features, like: - rss feeds - other formatting types (ie: wiki formatting, markdown)

but it works.