As some may know, I take a very personal approach to building my blogs. Only artisinal, hand-crafted blog solutions would do. Most recently, I was on “Ikiwiki” - a Perl answer to the “site builder” idea popularized by Jekyll and Hyde.
Needless to say, mindshare on a system targeted at Perl programmers was not really strong enough to keep the system up with the ever-changing standards for publishing content online. Reactive layout for small screens, live refresh, very fast reload - it became too much overhead to maintain, with too buggy indexes, and occasional non-termination when publishing.
I am now site building using Hugo, instead. There’s some unpublished stuff I wrote over a year ago - a collection of go ‘context’ posts that I didn’t publish individually, but wrote a combined post for the gopher academy advent calendar 2016 series. They’re a little droll but might serve to expand on some of the details of that post:
- Go’s
contextlibrary - Using Go’s
contextlibrary for logging - Using Go’s
contextlibrary for performance monitoring - Using Go’s
contextlibrary in panic handlers - Go’s
contextlibrary: more patterns and anti-patterns
I’ve also put up a post from 2007 that was highly circulated - An introduction to git-svn for Subversion/SVK users and deserters. Previously I just had an old draft, but the real thing had fallen off the internet, so I thought I should just put the full document up. This piece was quite influential, I guess; talked about a bit, and shortly afterwards I made a talk at OSCON in Portland about Git (and, obstensibly, bzr and hg, though I could make no convincing case for these). How things have changed since that piece was written!
The reality about why my blog is back up now, is that I had a major accident; more about that on social media. Tinkering with my blog doesn’t seem like work, so here it is! Hopefully the maintenance on this one will see it for years to come, lowering the bar for me to publish. Who knows; this might even become a habit this time.
And of course, I’d be remiss not to thank the person whose ability to pick up the slack of domestic duties and childminding I’d be completely stuck, my wife, Melia. She is keeping this going as much as I am.