Looking Out To Sea

Less than a month ago I set up this blog with Octopress. I was inspired by Nick’s move in that direction.

I suffered a great deal trying to get Ruby installed with the correct versions but in the end I managed it. I was impressed with how nice blogging could be when stripped down to the basics. I’ve been writing my posts with Markdown formatting for years — it’s nice that the rest of the blogging world has caught up. :-)

I was looking forward to blogging more, but the next time I tried to update my blog something had gone very wrong. The versions of various parts of the system had got out of sync and I couldn’t update any more.

At this point plan B kicked into play and I started looking at another tool for generating static blogs, Hakyll. It had one thing going strongly in its favour — it was written in Haskell which I understand rather than Ruby which I haven’t taken the time to study. But this familiarity was necessary because Hakyll is not a plug-n-play system. It’s more of a library suite for putting together your own static blog generator. (See Xmonad for the same story with tiling window managers.)

So I’ve been quiet on the blogging front in order to get this blog running in the background. I also had to come up with some style (sorry about that), which I have borrowed from various places. But as someone once said, “as long as you don’t leave any fingerprints at the scene of the crime”…