Sun 2018-07-29 14:44:00 -0400
The last time I switched to a new platform for blogging it was
2013-06-08, just over five years ago. Now I’m moving again, this time
to WordPress. It’s all because my blog broke.
It happened in a thunderstorm. My computer wasn’t struck by lightning
but we did suffer a power failure and the one casualty was the system
disk on the Linux machine that held, among other things, my blog.
My last leap was onto a combination of writing in Markdown, rendering
with Octopress/Jekyll, and publishing to Github’s pages. Everything
was free. My main motivation and target was to use locally written
files in Markdown. I wanted my blog to originate as text files
regardless of how they were published.
Of course the source files were all backed up but the system disk had
some of the Ruby-based infrastructure that Octopress/Jekyll needed.
Getting Octopress and Jekyll working again has proved to be quite a
struggle. Finally, I almost have it working using both the original
installation and configuration files as well as the relatively new
Octopress 3.0. However, it’s such a struggle every time I have to do
something with Octopress that I’ve been looking for something else.
To it’s credit, I can’t find anything that seems to provide what
Octopress does, especially the ability to create a static site.
THAT BRINGS US TO WORDPRESS. I guess I’m back to a hosting service
but I’m still committed to using Markdown. There is a plugin that
will take Markdown but it seems that you need to spend $300 per year
for the business version to be able to add plugins, at least on
Wordpress.com. That’s infinitely more than the free versions of
everything that I’d been using.
I could deploy my own instance of WordPress on AWS but I’m really not
interested in running a WordPress site.
What I can do is generate HTML with Marked2 from Markdown and paste it
into the WordPress HTML editor. That pretty much works. Generating
the HTML without the CSS included creates the core of the file
contents which is exactly what is needed. It’s a few steps to create
a post but that’s about as much as it was before when I’d write a post
where I generated the blog, publish it locally on my machine, then
upload it to the public site.
The old 2013-2018 static version will be put on an AWS static site, in
an S3 bucket, and as an archive and left there for posterity and back
references.
As usual, I’m still not happy with the look and feel of the new site,
but it’s a work in progress as these always are.
Monolith149 Daily 