Yet another dmbaturin’s blog iteration

Last update: 2018-02-20

Looks like my blogging cycle is two years in and two years out. Not that I run out of things to write about, it's just that good technical writing is a surprisingly time consuming endeavor. You get to verify every example, check every proof, look up every detail in the standards and so on. The world doesn't need more posts that create more troubles for the reader than they solve.
Still last time what drove me away from blogging was, surprisingly, the tools. So many blogging platforms are horrible, and finding a good one is a challenge.

So many blogging platforms seem to actively discourage any kind of geeky content. They tend to raise questions like:

Why do I need to jump through the hoops to insert preformatted text?
Why I can’t insert raw HTML?
If I can’t insert raw HTML, why angle brackets inside the post are removed rather than escaped?
Why HTML entities are removed? No, seriously, why?
Why do you need to convert my lossless PNG images into JPEG?

I’ve been trying to only use dynamically generated web content when it’s absolutely necessary last time, so I thought jumping on the static blog generator bandwagon is a natural thing to do. My main website is using a homegrown generator because sometimes it’s easier to just write your own software than to configure existing one to do the right thing, but for a blog this approach seemed more trouble than it’s worth, so I decided to go generator shopping first.

So far Pelican looks like the best tool for the job. We’ll see how it goes. At least it’s far easier to migrate to another generator than it is to migrate to another CMS.