New Software

It has been a while since I wrote a blog entry. Mainly because I did not have a place to write it. I had run my blog on my own software dertyn for a while, but a few things made me stop:

  • I did not want to keep paying to run a hosted server
  • I did not want to maintain a server.
  • The cost of hosting a server to serve almost static pages was a waste.
  • I did not have time to maintain the PHP + mysql code and it was probably full of security holes.

I had moved my site to Tumblr, but quickly got tired of that site. Then I moved it to Blogger and that was OK. But, I really wanted to be able to have all my content for myself. I have been using Nearly Free Speech to host my personal domain hellomookie.com because it is really cheap to host static content there (a few cents per month if there is not too much traffic). I had been wanting to write some long-form content for a while now. I didn’t have much choice. I could write it on Facebook, but it would get lost in the shuffle. It is really hard to go back in time on Facebook. I could write it on LinkedIn (as I did for two posts), but that is professional network and I want to write about stuff outside of my professional stuff.

So, a few months ago, I was thinking of writing something to generate blog posts from static files. I didn’t really make much of it until Friday night when I sat down and wrote down some ideas about how I wanted the software to work. I spent part of Friday night writing out some of the script and finished up the basics Saturday afternoon. The script is called mmb (aka. mookie’s mini blog). It reads in Markdown formatted files plus templates and creates html files, an index file and an RSS feed file. Everything is spit out in a static fashion and I can host it on Nearly Free Speech without having to turn on PHP and mysql (saving money per month).

The script works, but the style is pretty ugly. I will spent some time pushing pixels around in the next few days. But, it is nice to be able to write long-form stuff again.