--- /dev/null
+[[!meta title="New Blag, yay!"]]
+[[!meta author="rohieb"]]
+[[!meta license="CC-BY-SA 3.0"]]
+[[!img defaults size=x200]]
+
+Sooo. You might already have noticed that I moved my [blag][] from
+[wordpress.com][r.wp.c] to my own domain. There were several reasons for that,
+which also kept me from blogging actively. At first, WordPress seemed like a
+good solution for beginners, and since I didn’t want to set up my own ([probably
+buggy][wp-bugs]) instance, a hosted blog at WordPress.com seemed like the best
+solution to get started with blogging.
+
+[blag]: http://xkcd.com/148/
+[r.wp.c]: http://rohieb.wordpress.com
+[wp-bugs]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress#Vulnerabilities
+
+However, the free plan at WordPress.com does not allow very much customization:
+you can choose from a few themes, but you can neither edit the underlying <abbr
+title="Hypertext Markup Language">HTML</abbr> framework of the page, nor is is
+possible to do a little <abbr title="Cascading Style Sheets">CSS</abbr>
+tweaking. For example, I like my <code><code></code> tags with a little
+darker background so they become more distinguished from the remaining text and
+so you can easily see what you have to type on your keyboard and what not.
+
+Also, I had to write blogposts in my browser. I’m not a big fan of the idea that
+the browser should become an “operating system” for the <strike>web</strike>
+cloud. My computer is more than a dumb terminal for the web, I like my terminals
+and my offline applications and distributed workflows. In most cases, I find
+distributed workflows much more flexible, and you can choose if and when you
+want to lose control over your data to the cloud. And, without question, I lost
+more than one draft to browser crashes (admittedly, Firefox got a lot more
+stable since then), accidentally closed tabs and timed out login sessions. And
+WordPress tends to be overloaded with complex page layouts and JavaScript, which
+makes everything soooo slooooow…
+
+So it seemed obvious to move my blog to my existing site, which already runs on
+[ikiwiki][]. For those who do not know ikiwiki, it is a static site generator
+which takes [Markdown][][^1] files as input and spits out static HTML pages. It
+works good in combination with [Git][] (a distributed version control system,
+which I use all day anyway), which makes it possible to write and preview every
+page on your own computer, using your favourite editor, offline (in fact I’m
+writing this post from a laundrette), and when everything is finished (and you
+have Internet access), you push it to your server, where everything is rendered.
+There is also [an easy way][ikiwiki-blog] to aggregate multiple pages to a blog,
+including the automatic generation of RSS and Atom feeds. Also I have full
+control over the [[CSS|local.css]] (which will probably still change in the next
+few weeks) and the [[templates]] used to render the HTML files. For example, I
+have hacked together a [little plugin][flattrthing.pm] to support Flattr buttons
+and integrated it into the template which is used to render the blog posts.
+There is even a dynamic part of ikiwiki which allows users to add comments, I
+will probably try that in the future and convert all the WordPress comments.
+And finally, if you want, you can read the full [source code][] of every page
+:-)
+
+The move to ikiwiki was already in my head a long time, so I started writing new
+blogposts in Markdown right away, so they started piling up on my disk. Now that
+I have the new setup, I already have content to fill the next few weeks, so stay
+tuned!
+
+[ikiwiki]: http://ikiwiki.info
+[Markdown]: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax
+[Git]: http://git-scm.com
+[ikiwiki-blog]: http://ikiwiki.info/blog/
+[source code]: http://git.rohieb.name/www-rohieb-name.git
+[flattrthing.pm]: http://git.rohieb.name/www-rohieb-name.git/blob/HEAD:/plugins/IkiWiki/Plugin/flattrthing.pm
+[MultiMarkdown]: https://rawgithub.com/fletcher/human-markdown-reference/master/index.html
+[reStructuredText]: http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
+[Textile]: http://textile.sitemonks.com/
+[^1]: Though I’m using [MultiMarkdown][] for most pages, which is a superset of
+ Markdown with additional features (like footnotes). But ikiwiki also
+ supports other markup languages, e.g. [reStructuredText][] or [Textile][].
+
+[[!tag meta ikiwiki Markdown Git WordPress blogging]]
projects / www-rohieb-name.git / blobdiff