Fighting blog software is tiring.

After some serious consideration, I’ve decided to roll my own software for this site. Why? Wordpress is a fairly massive security liability, and I’d like to avoid the ongoing maintenance effort (or cost of hosted service). Worse, I’ve found that each new version focusing more on being a full-fledged CMS and less on simple blogging. And - yet worse - I’d like to nuke MySQL / MariaDB as a “thing” on this server.

My original blog was a simple M4 macro and Makefile for a static site. This removed the ability to have comments, but at the time, I was utilizing a static hosting service anyway (no databases!). Management was really darn easy in this case, outside of the gnarly aspect of updates.

Eventually, I’d like to introduce a new/custom BBS style piece of software to run this site - complete with comments, mailbox, and user features. Right now though, I have scant time to actually maintain this thing, and I’d like to “simplify” my tech life management into something that’s easy to work with. The original blog will remain available for some time under the /blog directory (to maintain links) - while I work on conversion.

If you’re curious to see the (REALLY HACKY!) software stack used for this blog, I’m hosting it on github. Blog entries are simple markdown file with a side-load JSON file to specify all the meta data. A compile python script scans for files, builds an indexes, and poops out some static HTML.

Boom. Done. Simple is better.