So after a weekend romp trying to run this site off of Jekyll, I’m back on WordPress. On the whole, a pretty frustrating experience.
My inability to keep up with a blog aside, Jekyll scratched some itches that had been annoying me for a while. It builds static sites (assuming you don’t add any scripting later on), so fewer chances to get hacked, and fewer patches/upgrades to worry about.
Then there’s the whole “owning the content” thing. Given that my hosting is via Dreamhost and I’ve got full control over my WordPress install, this isn’t such a big deal. But the geek in me liked having all the content in a bunch of markdown files instead of a database with an unfamiliar schema.
And then there’s writing in markdown itself, which I’ve found handy. I can think of at least one WordPress-savvy friend who shakes her head at the idea of markdown, but I liked having less between me and the text.
So I worked up a basic site layout, doing everything in a git repository because fuck yeah geekery. Ported the only two posts of mine that anyone’s ever read on this site to markdown, burned down the old WordPress install, and fired up Jekyll. And then I found all the flaws in the plan.
I want to be able to blog from my iOS devices and my desktop. There are markdown editors for all of the above, but the problem comes down to getting the content to the server for building. I couldn’t find an iOS editor that did markdown and could work with a git repository that didn’t have terrible reviews and hadn’t gone stale from lack of updates. Panic’s Diet Coda was a contender, but without native markdown, entering posts with anything special would be a bit tedious. And while I don’t mind the $20 price tag – it looks to be a quality app and I love their Prompt SSH client – it’d have to fit my needs better for me to snag it.
Then I remembered I own Textastic, which has WebDAV support. So I checked into syncing that up with (or without) my git repository. Turned into more of a headache than I wanted to deal with.
And then there’s Dropbox. I spent a while futzing with it before throwing up my hands and declaring that I wouldn’t be a slave to the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Dropbox has a Linux CLI client that works a treat on Dreamhost’s servers. But since I’m on a shared plan, I can’t keep the daemon running all the time. No prob I figure – just setup a corn job and we’re good. Nope. The app always wants to run as a daemon. No way to tell it “sync up, then exit”. And even if you could, their selective sync is such that while you can tell it 1) don’t sync anything, and then 2) exclude this folder from the blacklist, any folders you create after that step will be synced. It was when I started looking into writing my own ruby app to sync just my blog folder that I knew I’d gone too far down the rabbit hole.
So I’m back to WordPress. Given how little I actually write in this blog, it makes the most sense. I can post from any of my devices. I get notified by Dreamhost when they’ve upgraded my WP install. And the export function is a click away if I want to take my data elsewhere.