On DIY-ing A Blog Site

2022-08-03 19:53:55 PDT

This week my posts are kind of obsessed with process. Sorry: it's a boring way to start Blaugust. But it is what it is: I need to understand how to make my blogging process more permanent, and I'd like to keep a record of successes and failures.

So… much of yesterday was spent fixing GitAtom issues. I closed an issue or two and fixed some minor bugs. This site seems usable now for blogging, if a little fragile and weird.

I'm not yet sure whether choosing GitAtom was the right choice. Something like Ghost that I have used in the past might have been better. It offers many of the advantages of GitAtom, along with a fully-developed and polished experience.

GitAtom offers two things that I don't know how to get otherwise:

Low-friction Git-backed Markdown blogging with remote publishing. Lots of systems offer some subset of these features. I know of none that offers the whole package.
Absolute zero lock-in. By maintaining blog content in 100% standard open formats, and code as fully open-source extremely simple Python, GitAtom ensures that both repairing the existing codebase and migrating content elsewhere are easily achievable.

I have built code to extricate my old blog content from the clutches of an ancient version of Drupal when I could no longer maintain or upgrade my site. blog-escape is incomplete and ugly, and does a poor job. I don't want that experience again.

What GitAtom doesn't offer is an Atom feed.

Yes, I know. Being easily able to provide an Atom feed was one of the big selling points of storing all the content in Atom syndication format. The code never got written. The Atom feed files being saved by GitAtom appear not to be RFC compliant, which will need to be fixed before trying to generate a feed from them.

So now I have two projects.

Blog daily for Blaugust.
Fix my blogging tool — in particular by adding an Atom feed.

Will admit to discouragement, but it has to be done. Onward.

P.S. — While trying to find blog-escape above I Googled "bartmassey blog rescue". I got a hit for this book, which confused me mightily for a moment. Needless to say, I am not the Bart Massey who wrote this book with an oddly relevant keyword.

The interwebs are weird.