New Blog Going Up Today

During some spare train time, I decided to begin transitioning my blog over to Jeykll! Why? My original blog/wiki was build around Dokuwiki. I liked the idea of having the core data in text format, and not in a database that would be tied to a specific version of whatever blogging software I happened to be using. While dokuwiki has served it’s purpose, it’s not primarily a blogging platform, and I worry about the long-term maintenance of the Dokuwiki codebase.

So why Jeykll specifically. A few reasons:

• All pages, including posts, are stored in markdown. This is fairly similar to Dokuwiki wiki format, but a bit more standardized.
• Being pure text files, all the configuration and data can be put into a version control repository of some sort. Dokuwiki had history, but did not use any type of standard storage method. The downside is change history is hard to view without going into the VCS, but that is addressed somewhat below.
• Github will provide free hosting, and had tie-ins to auto-generate the HTML when committed.
• The site uses pure HTML. This seems a bit contrary to all my recent activity in the web arena, but ultimately frees me from upgrades and maintenance of the application and database layers that would be in a traditional blogging platform, as well as a lot of security concerns. Looking at you Wordpress….

I’m planning to transition everything of importance from my dokuwiki system. Once that transition is complete the dokuwiki site will be removed. There’s a bit of dust still around, but that will be cleared up as more content is moved over.