Static site

I’ve used CMS systems in the past for blogging and I’ve alway found myself eventually getting frustrated with some aspect of the CMS tool. Most recently it’s been code blocks. Can’t understand why CMS tools have such a hard time presenting a code block. This should be a no-brainer:

def main():
    print("Hello World")

And so should this lambda x: x*X!

I think the key here is that most CMS tools want to present the blogger with a cute WYSIWYG editor and I’ve come to realize that I don’t need or want a WYSIWYG editor. I have written gobs of information in Latex and it was really satisfying to remove the distractions of absolute formatting. Leave it simple and let the computer figure it out. (Although I did find myself fighting with the placement of hyphens in some cases.)

markdown

Hugo (and probably other static site builders) can translate Markdown source into web pages. The markdown language is pretty clean and I’ve found a reasonable Cheatsheet . I’m also back to using my wonderful emacs editor along with ispell-minor-mode to keep me from making any silly spelling errors.

git

The other challenge I’ve had with CMS tools is the extract of content. When I decide to ditch one CMS tool for another, there usually is a challenge getting the content out into a form that is indepentent of the CMS tool where it was originally written. Using markdown and a static site render, I can easily store my writing in a git repo. The markdown is natively text, so no strange translations needed if I choose to move on to another too.

deployment

So the next challenge for the weekend is to get this site rendered as static html and re-routing my domain to it. More to come!