Introducing Blogthing
2008-05-27 11:37AM PDT/Work
You may have noticed that things look a little different 'round these here parts. What happened was I finally broke down, bit the bullet, and rolled my own blogging software. I've been calling it blogthing for lack of a better name. What blogthing is, is a couple hundred lines of ruby code that picks up my posts as plain text files, applies one of a few templates and generates plain old, gloriously spartan static html and an rss feed. Basic, basic. The software isn't ready for general release, I'll toss it out there at some point.
RSS: For those folks reading via rss, the old feed now redirects to the new one. Hopefully you won't notice a change other than perhaps a bunch of read articles appearing unread all of a sudden. Sorry about that. For the record, the new rss feed is available at: feed://www.hinkty.com/blogthing/index.xml . Please do update.
Archive: My monthly archives show that month's articles as a short summary in chronological order (not newest first). I borrowed this from my original hand-rolled blog and I've missed it ever since. I want to add some additional features to the monthly pages, like listing books read, movies watched, that kind of thing. I'll get there.
I'm also in the process of backfilling old articles off of Wordpress, and into my new blog format. Over time, I'll move everything out. As I backfill, the old post will redirect to the new version.
Why? I was pretty happy with Wordpress, but the security issues pushed me over the edge. I didn't want to be upgrading Wordpress every month. Nothing is as secure as plain old static html. Nothing is as fast either. Things may be a little rough around the edges for a bit, but hang in there with me.
Missing Stuff: The biggest missing feature in the new system is comments. I apologize to all those people who wrote comments, I'll get a new comment system up and running eventually. In the meantime please do email me any comments you may have.
Credits: I drew design inspiration from Steven Frank's site as well as John Gruber's Daring Fireball. Thanks guys.