Happy New Year, with love, Desi

Watch on YouTube: youtu.be/pFAKAWP_sec

This is the story of a blog.

Nearly 15 years ago...

I started blogging on EasyJournal R.I.P. and then I created two or three LiveJournals. I flirted with MySpace R.I.P. for all of maybe two posts. A few years later picked up, Blogger / Blogspot.

So literally half of the hosted services I used are gone - not even recoverable from the wayback machine - and I don't know if I ever made backups

Hosted services are just a bad idea.

A hard disk I can count on

Moving to static blogs was a good idea.

I started with Jekyll, because it was all the rage on github (gh-pages and all, y'know), but soon thereafter became stagnent - and it just wasn't very easy to get started with a nice theme and set of plugins.

While creating Jekyll-Aid I came across Jekyll Bootstrap, and that lead me to Ruhoh, where I was quite happy because it had so much more "baked in".

Octopress was starting to gain traction, but I was faithfully grounded in Ruhoh, despite the changes from 1.0 to 2.1 and on constantly breaking in small (but significant to my menial understanding) ways.

Oh, and ruby. RUBY. Ugh... ruby. I don't think there ever has been or ever will be an ecosystem that breaks more often. I love ruby... but I hate ruby. Every trouble with every installation whenever upgrading or switching between OS X, macports, brew, rvm, 1.8.6, 1.9, 2.0... ugh... ruby...

Gist-ing the git of it

I start a gist with a few scrap lines of "oh, I'll need to remember this" and 5 years later I've suddenly got 102, many of which are full-blown articles that should be preserved to my legacy, y'know?

But 10.5 lead to 10.6 lead to 10.7, 10.8... and sometime after May 2014 I just couldn't figure out how to get Ruhoh to compile my blog and I didn't want to spend the time, so I gisted on.

I must have already been on the decline, but I only made one lonely single post in all of 2014.

Resolutions Resolved

This year I wanted to get back to my craft - meaning the blogging, but after several hours of wrestling with Ruhoh and Ruby and Vagrant (oh my!) and trying different versions of this and that... I gave up.

Then I resolved to go back to what I almost wanted to do years ago (one of those things you want to do because... well, you really don't want to... but it's an itch, so... yeah) - I decided it was finally time to write my own static blog platform!

From January 3rd until today (January 15th), I've fumbled my way through first trying to emulate ruhoh, then abondoning the idea, then realizing that I could actually have my cake and eat it too.

I feel so accomplished in finally having a system I know how to fix, and also slightly embarassed because I don't want people to know it took me two weeks to do something that seems like the good programmers I know could do in a weekend / hackathon.

Anyway,

Desi is born!

This is my first post of the new year. :D Yay!

I could have written a post last week, but I decided that until Desi was something that I could reasonably see my sister being able to use (she can copy and paste to the terminal when she has to), I wasn't going to settle for something I alone could hack together.

And to be honest, if it isn't simple enough for my sister to use, would I even want to use it? I would have forgotten what my setup was and not have been able to reproduce the results or something like that and then it would have been a waste.

It may not be the fanciest blog platform right now, but I'm excited about it, the design is headed in the right direction, and it's in JavaScript.

P.S.

time desi build \
  && rsync -avhHPz \
  compiled/ \
  blog.coolaj86.com:~/webapps/vhosts/blog.coolaj86.com/public/
        3.07 real         1.29 user         0.28 sys

I've never had it so good. :D

By AJ ONeal

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(you can learn about the bigger picture I'm working towards on my patreon page )