Julius Plenz – Blog

I started this blog exactly one year ago. Over the course of this year, I wrote 105 articles. That is not really much, and I want to write more – just about the stuff that's on my mind. So stay tuned. ;-)

A Happy New Year to all my readers!

It has been a little more than three months since I last posted something here in my blog. Considering that the first post ever in this blog was from 1st of January this year, this pretty much looked like a "tried to blog, but gave it up again" thing.

I was really busy, however, and was simply not able to write a single post. What really ate up all my time was my latest pet project, writing a German book about Git. Valentin (my co-author) and I worked really hard throughout the past few weeks – only got up once in a while to get something to eat and stock up on Club Mate. The book is being published at Open Source Press and will be available from the end of June. Go buy it!

Now, with a lot of free time on my hands, I can finally get back to my studies (yes, really). Also, I will devote more time to this blog. :-)

Which blog software to take? – Not a simple question to answer.

I had my mind on Ikiwiki for quite some time. I haven't got it working, though. After several tries, I gave up. (The problem had in part something to do with an outdated git version, which I cannot upgrade on the server without going through quite some hassle.)

I decided to use Jekyll now. As with other "static site generators", the documentation is pretty rudimentary (and largely not very helpful). After some hours of fiddling around, I finally found a way to integrate tags and a tag cloud. This blog post has been very helpful, although I had to patch the file. Strangely, also, Jekyll refused to load any plugins when calling it like

/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/jekyll --no-auto <source> <destination>

To fix this, I set up git's post-receive hook to cd to that directory first, and then call Jekyll with . as source paramter.

Time for a quick listing of pros and cons:

pro

• Write posts in vim with Markdown syntax
• Store every modification in a git repo
• Publish with a simple git push

contra

• Written in ruby (I'd have liked Perl much better)
• Lots of ruby/gem/rake/whatever stuff
• No extensive Documentation or User's Guide available

The template mechanisms seem managable, though. As for security and speed, the pages are generated once (even for pagination stuff) and are copied as simple static HTML pages to the web server. This is nice.

In the weeks to come I might publish the git repo of this blog where my other git repos are at.

2011 is here. I will try to maintain a blog again. The last time I gave up because I had nothing to write any more (I thought). I discover, though, that a lot of people like to read what I write.

So I have a blog again. I'll post random stuff here. Might just be about UNIX tools; philosophy; math stuff; books I read; links I like. English or German, -- maybe other languages in the future.

Stay tuned. :-)