New home for a blog

My blog has moved to a dedicated new home: http://www.mikerowecode.com/

All appropriate redirects are in place, but please check your feed reader to be sure. I’ve done a far-reaching survey of a wide range of users and clients–ok, well, actually myself and one friend, both using NetNewsWire–and it seems that it works fine when the feed is accessed directly, but if you have it syncing via NewsGator it doesn’t correctly propagate the new feed URL. It does follow the redirect to get the feed content, but doesn’t to push the changed URL back to the client. I’d be interested to hear about experiences with other readers.

A word about what’s behind curtain

The new site is built from text files using the blosxom publishing system. The text files are formated using John Gruber’s Markdown, with punctuation fixed by his SmartyPants.

I use a number of plugins for blosxom to get things working the way I want. These include archives and recententries to provide the navigation options in the sidebar, entries_index to maintain article time stamps and atomfeed to produce, er, an atom feed. :)

Blosxom runs in “static” mode to generate the site locally, and then I rsync it to my web server, where it’s served as static HTML.

Why blosxom?

It probably seems like a strange choice, when there are so many “advanced” alternatives such as Drupal (which was my previous system), WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, etc., etc. But a couple of things convinced me that blosxom was the way to go.

First, my needs are minimal. I just want to publish the stuff I write with the minimum of fuss and overhead. I wanted a publishing system that would get out of the way.

Second, there is something very appealing about keeping things in plain text. I can write in emacs (which is of course the One True Editor), manage changes with git, search with grep (or spotlight). The directory layout is the same on my hard disk as on the public server. There’s no database to worry about backing up.

Finally, since I’m serving static HTML, in the (admittedly far-fetched) event that this site becomes wildly popular and sees huge amounts of traffic, scaling will be trivial. :)