Unauthoritative Pronouncements

I have complained an awful lot about Tumblr on Tumblr. You know, because I can. I have been doing things on the side to try and get a system together that I am happy with so I can transition on to my own, self-hosted solution. This is a point of pride, not of practicality.

I had Sid yelling about how great Statamic is, Casey wrote his own blogging engine, Jerph kept talking about how great Jekyll is, several recommendations for Pelican came through… but none of them are a perfect fit for tiny, nitpicky reasons.

The simpler the system is, the less immediate control I have over the system. The level of abstraction in the code is too dense for me to flip some bits and get exactly what I want without committing time to learning some very specific things. Much of this has to do with styling. I want something very minimal, but even the most minimal templates have all kinds of options buried in them.

This is also why I have started, and stopped, writing something like 10-12 blogging engines over the last 3 years. I haven’t launched anything on any of the platforms because they were all fundamentally flawed. I was trying to do too much all at once to make any of it work. Like a Dropbox API link to pull down files and convert them using my own templating system in Pythonista —an iOS app. That was pretty nutty.

The current attempt was inspired by Casey Liss’ Camel engine —to a degree— but more about the fact that he rolled his own, than anything else. The kinds of organizational changes I wanted to make to the files in his system were not ones he’d want to pull down because this is his engine for him, and I needed to make my engine for me.

Yak Barber

I have joked about the whole yak-shaving thing before. It’s true though, this project is 100 percent, grass-fed, locally-sourced, humanely-raised, fair-trade yak-shaving. It’s up on GitHub so I can publicly sort out my mental issues in front of everyone. It’s a single python file that handles all the processing, and another python file that handles all the settings. When this gets stable, I don’t want to edit my script to change variables, I shouldn’t need to at that point. It houses all the assets in a /templates directory, with the assets housed under their own subdirectory. This is for the inevitable fiddling with different things that I’ll want to test later, they can all be safely housed, discretely. Taking a cue from Casey, I used mustache for my templates instead of something more traditional, like Jinja2, or Mako, or something (or something stupid, like rolling my own again.)

The real big problem is the Atom feed. Mustache doesn’t seem to want to process clean XML for it even though the HTML is fine. Unicode characters are fun, when you never have to think about them.

The styling is rudimentary, and will be quickly revisited, but only after the Atom problems are sorted.

Most of the mess in the code is from making Python dictionaries as I went along. I will hopefully clean those up. It generates my site in about 1 second though, so it’s not really a performance problem, as much as it’s just ugly. Posts should really be a class with all the relevant metadata that will be needed later stored on the class.

Instead of using the codehilite extension of the Markdown package, I’m using highlight.js client-side. The few code snippets I have just don’t merit the fuss for setting the code type, and using particular delimiters just to satisfy that extension.

A preview of the ultra-minimalist-but-still-doesn’t-work site is here on the DigitalOcean VPS that houses prompt.photos.