Moving blogs

I am moving blogging platforms and thought I should maybe explain why.

In the past I have been hosting my blog on Google’s Blogger platform. This has served me pretty well over the years along with the limited number of posts I have made. However, as I have tried to expand the blog into more of a general website, it has been an uphill battle fighting against the workflow of the blogging system itself. I don’t forsee wordpress being much different.

Besides, one of my reasons for moving to my current setup was simplicity and control. I am using a static site generator now (ala Jekyll). The reasons for this being that:

1. I now directly control my own content
2. I don’t need to set up a wordpress server or anything of the sort
3. There should never be downtime since the site is statically hosted on Github or S3 or whereever
4. Inline with number 1, I can version control my content (with something simple like git)
5. I can write my posts in MarkDown
6. I can embed source code styling instead of reaching out to JavaScript libraries to do it dynamically at run time

I like all these reasons. It also means I can theme the site however I like using simple HTML templates. I can also add whatever types of pages I want since in the end it is just static HTML.

Really, there are lots of reasons to use a static site generator. I am currently using frog, the frozen blog generator, written in a somewhat lesser known language called Racket (a dialect of Lisp descended from Scheme). I like the Lisp in general and Racket in specific. I want to support its increased usage and the best way to do that is to use projects that use it.

I plan to port over my old blog posts once I get a chance, although that may prove to be a bit of a chore. I’ll probably end up avoiding it for a super long time.

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