The beginning of this blog has been foretold for a long time now. There was always something that stopped me from doing it though.

First a little bit of history.

My first blog had its home on blogspot. Even though it was convenient it was not powerful enough for my needs. The formatting was annoying and there was no easy way to tell it to add syntax highlighting to a piece of code. This may have changed nowadays with Google's changes to blogspot but my distate for it is still present so I don't want to go back there.

My second attempt involved wordpress. By that time I was involved with Nimrod and wordpress had no syntax highlighting for Nimrod. There were other issues too i'm sure, which I cannot remember. Possibly the fact that it is written in PHP, feels like bloatware, requires MySQL and that I didn't feel like dabbling with its templates.

Which brings me to my most recent attempts. I noticed more and more that static blog generators have become very fashionable so I decided to try them out for myself. Having no Ruby experience I was reluctant to try Jekyll but it seemed easy to set up so I gave it a go. Sadly though, I was met with a lot of errors due to its dependency on Pygments which failed because I have Python 3 installed on my system. After many failed attempts I just decided that it was not for me.

I then decided to try Pelican with little hope of it working since it's completely written in Python, but it mentioned that the latest release supports Python 3 and seeing that I am more familiar with Python I decided to give it a try. Pelican felt like a true nightmare though, using makefiles to build the blog is horrendous so I gave up using it.

I also tried Hakyll but its long compilation time has majorly deterred me from it.

After almost 6 months I finally decided to just write a static blog generator in Nimrod and be done with it. I'm certainly glad I did. The blog is here, it works, and it looks great. Ipsum genera (what I named this blog generator) is also extremely fast, and it didn't even take me longer than 3 days to write it, of course I can't accurately measure the time as I have been hacking the style of this site along the way. But the commit history speaks for itself. If you would like to use it you can, but the documentation is sparse, so use at own risk. It's licensed under MIT and available on github.

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I certainly hope that I will be able to sustain my motivation to write blog articles. The articles that I will write on this blog will be about a range of topics from programming to random things about my life. The articles will be tagged appropriately so you will be able to ignore the non-interesting things easily.

Thanks for reading and I hope you will stick around.

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This article has been tagged as Hello World , programming , blog