Yep, another new layout. More importantly, I’ve based it on a different underlying system. Octopress, which I was using before, got me interested enough in static blog generators not to go with something like Wordpress instead. Unfortunately, I got tired of dealing with the mountain of Ruby dependencies it has, most of which are not handled by my package manager. It was a chore having to install a bunch of software just to make a post on a new system.
I instead sought out something that only depends on the usual software installed on a GNU/Linux system. I saw nanoblogger, which was interesting but honestly, it’s way too complex for what I need to occasionally update this site. Finally, I found a project on Github called m4-bakery which depends only on m4 and Make, which are everywhere. It’s admittedly a bit complicated to understand its inner workings at first, thanks to the occasional oddness of m4. In fact, its original author recommends not actually using it. Ultimately, it was perfect. The only challenge was to implement a news/blog index and an Atom XML feed, both of which I eventually figured out with some Make trickery.
"But Brandon," you say, "this site looks like it was designed by a 14 year old in 1992." Indeed. Unfortunately, I despise web design and I ultimately don’t care very much. I copied the classic Zenburn color scheme because I find it easy on my eyes. Everything else is pretty plain-but-functional. The content hasn’t changed, other than that my music section lacks music while I search for an alternative to Soundcloud. I haven’t implemented a proper tagging system yet, though, and I don’t know if I will. I don’t post often enough for such tags to be useful, in my opinion.
Anyway, enjoy!