Why blogging

Why me bloggingl? First it came from keeping notes from what I have learned in IT. The IT knowledge area is wide and wast, there is no chance I could remember all of it.

Sometimes I learn something and the skill is not used later for longer time. If had not written it down, I would have forgotten it. So I developed some ways of storing the information. Starting with plain files, spread over my Oracle Virtualbox VM. Then I peeked my friend taking notes in the Google Docs. It had file versioning, rich format cabapilities. It could be even shared among friends. I started taking notes there as well. But sharing among friends is not enough I wanted to share most of them publicly.

Considering above I moved to blogging instead, and choose Blogspot as my platform. I created a couple of posts during over a year but soon I discovered it is rather not my preference. Blogspot was too heavy for me, too slow, too stiff. I could not take a breath. And despite I usually like with what Google comes with (it is owned by Google) I did not like Blogspot at all.

Recently I have found Jekyll, it is static website rendered from text templates. Posts can be written in markdown or textile. Both formats are good enough for me, allow for rich format and media sharing. The content is under git (actually github) version control. Looks like it is the solution I was looking for. Geekish enough, easy to edit, I can take the whole site with me and a single git push is enough to publish my changes.

Jekyll

Markdown syntax is simpler than HTML and Jekyll supports it out of the box. There are myriad extensions for other formats as well including Textile.

Jekyll also offers powerful support for code snippets:

from sgmllib import SGMLParser

class URLLister(SGMLParser):
	def reset(self):
		SGMLParser.reset(self)
		self.urls = []

	def start_a(self, attrs):
		href = [v for k, v in attrs if k=='href']
		if href:
			self.urls.extend(href)

Check out the Jekyll docs for more info on how to get the most out of Jekyll. File all bugs/feature requests at Jekyll’s GitHub repo. If you have questions, you can ask them on Jekyll’s dedicated Help repository.

  1. Jekyll can be also deployed directly to S3.
  2. Jekyll Themes
  3. Jekyll News
  4. Collections: Baleter’s introduction and original Jekyll’s docs on collections.
  5. Tags - also quite nice layout of gihub based jekyll site.
  6. Awesome Jekyll Plugins

Liquid

Some day I discovered Flask and its Jinja templates. And this was a great template system for the web.

Later on, when I found Jekyll and its template system – Liquid, it came to me, they (Liquid-Jinja) are similar in syntax.

Liquid posts

Sass

Sass is an extension to CSS, a preprocessor which allows to use variables, nesting, arithmetic operators. It also allows to share a set of CSS properties from one selector to another (@extend). Here is Sass Reference.

CoffeeScript

Markdown

  1. Markdown Syntax
  2. Python Markdown Extensions
  3. PHP Markdown Extensions
  4. pandoc Markdown Extension - versatile unix tool to convert between text formats.
  5. Textile Syntax