One More Time, With Feeling
I'm Back!
Maybe.
Probably.
Honestly, "back" implies that I ever really took a crack at this blogging thing with any seriousness at all before, which is dubious. But I am going to, yet again, try to make a serious effort at writing here regularly.
The ol' ball and chain's been pretty
busted the past few days. Why? As with anyone who wants to get back into
the habit of writing, you must first re-build your blogging system from
the ground-up. Obviously. This time, of course, will
be different. Armed
with my current favorite crop of technologies (which I will detail
below), I'm writing a set of tools let me build static pages (or, in my
far-too-literal to HTML5 system, <article>s) in my
preferred authoring environment: my beloved code editor.
(I start nerding out right about here.)
I've been writing HTML long enough that it's caused permanent brain damage. I think of all documents in terms of markup, and deconstruct magazines to figure out how I'd float that sidebar just so. Naturally, then, I'm authoring posts directly in HTML. If I'd like a post to look a little different from the others, I have the ability to apply custom CSS and JavaScript. Anything too far afield, I can generate a one-off page that doesn't have to fit into the normal post template.
To aid me in this process, I've called in support from some technologies I've fallen in love with in the line of duty working on my current project at Mozilla:
- Python: While I'd love to do this whole project in node.js, The package and file-interaction capabilities are just better in Python right now. I may migrate later, but getting up to speed quickly was my initial goal, and Python's got my back.
- Jinja: We replace Django's templating engine in our projects at Mozilla with Jinja. The "block" pattern and template inheritance change the way you build markup template to more closely match the object oriented way you (hopefully) program. Fantastic stuff.
- PyQuery: jQuery-style DOM manipulation in Python. Yes please.
- LESS: Once you try LESS or Sass, you'll wonder how you ever wrote or maintained CSS before.
I've got the code to the point where I decided to write this post, including a local server that watches files for changes. I'll be adding features and such (and writing about them here!), but this is my "Hello World".
Hello, World!
There's plenty more where that came from!
I hope.