Julius Plenz – 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 (The problem had in part something to do with an outdated git version, which I cannot upgrade on the server without going through quite some hassle.)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.