The birth of nanoblag

The world needs yet another minimalistic blog engine.

— No one, ever.

A blog? What is this, 2006? Who even reads blog articles anymore? I certainely don't, at least not on a regular basis. I did stumble upon a nice blog after learning about O_PONIES on #btrfs, which led into a binge-reading about the "ext4 eats your data" controversy. And it made me want to have my own blog, again, after many failed attempts.

And writing blog engines is also a fun programming task. Because I plan to host this on GitLab pages, I want it to be static. Here's some of the design goals of nanoblag:

• dumb, entirely static, minimalistic featureset ;

• stripped down, accessible, readable layout ;

• clever usage of make to only regenerate pages as needed ;

• XHTML5 only (I am one of those freaks that like programatically generating XHTML, EasyDOM makes this less painful somewhat) ;

• write articles in Markdown (I ended up using PHP Markdown Extra).

The source code is, of course, publicly available and released under the WTFPLv2. The idea is to check out the code, commit your articles, layout and config changes to another branch, then merge the master branch periodically. Git is good at merging stuff and that's exactly what it's being used for here.

There will be no comments for nanoblag. I could use something like Disqus, but it is proprietary crap and it is terrible for everyone's privacy. If you really want to react to some thing I say here, send me an email and I will update the article.

I don't expect this blag to become an important project. Because of privacy reasons, I don't use services like Facebook or Twitter, but that doesn't mean I never want to share things with the rest of the world. Sometimes even, it's just about writing down thoughts for posterity.