davidgow.net: From bash to ruby

From bash to ruby

30 Nov 2013

Note: This site is now manually done HTML again. One day I'll maybe use a proper system again, but it is not this day! To avoid my own embarrasment preserve history, this particular page has been left un-updated from the original, and has had all links removed.

This "site" has basically always been generated by a horrifying set of bash scripts, which is pretty much as bad as it sounds. Lots of "echo" lines to output html.

So when I wanted to actually write something more "bloggy" (as if the work "blog" didn't sound stupid enough by itself...), I had two options: either make the bash scripts even more hacky, or migrate everything to a proper blog system.

I admit, I tried to fix the bash scripts, but it was not a pleasant experience. So: this whole site is now built on Jekyll, so that the one person who reads this doesn't need to feel tainted by shell scripts anymore.

The conversion was surprisingly easy once I'd spent enough time spelunking in the ruby world to work out what "gems" were, and I was able to do couple of neat things. Most notably, all of the old pages still have the same URLs, so none of the links I had are broken. I even was able to (after searching through twitter histories and last-modified times), re-purpose some of the old pages as blog posts from the past. To top things off, I was able to use my old web 0.9 style design, with no javascript in sight! Woohoo!

So expect there to be some actual content coming at some point in the future!