Welcome to Slashdong Version 2.
Didn't notice any differences? Good.
Through the past 8 months, I've been blogging very little. There are a
few reasons for that:
- Most of the technology that's been announced this year is rehashes
or will most likely never see the light of day (RealTouch, I'm
looking at you here)
- I hate MovableType. I hate it so fucking much. I just don't deal
well with that workflow. At all.
Now, instead of just letting things rot, I've decided to actually do
something about the second issue, and have moved to a new system. One
that works the way I do. That is, minimally and with lots of emacs
bindings.
Slashdong is now running on top of Jekyll, the violently
minimalist static page system used by the people at GitHub
(Thanks go to Cory Ondrejka for blogging his experience with it,
which got me looking at it, even though it's forced me to write some
Ruby. cringe). I've recently started hosting
my software projects over there, and ended up using jekyll to
generate some of the project websites, like the libnifalcon site.
This worked out well enough that I decided to take a shot at hosting
my larger blogs on it.
There are going to be a few things missing from this that we had over
on MovableType.
- Aggregate Date/Category Archives - Jekyll has a very, very
simplified archival system, that doesn't handle monthly/yearly
indexes. But, really, did anyone ever really use these? The only year
I posted enough for that was 2005.
- Message Boards - Ok, that's not specifically MT, but I'm removing
them completely anyways. They never got used much, and I've ported
most of the interesting information off of them.
There are also things that will start out broken but that I'm working
on fixing:
- A lot of the post formatting got hosed as I moved from MT/HTML to
Markdown (Thank god for html2text though).
- All message board links (from when articles were still stored on the
message boards, what a horrid idea that was) are still broken, as
they have been for about a year. Working on redirecting these to
posts now.
- Most of the MT formatted archival links should redirect to new URLs
properly, but I'm sure there's still a few broken things
- Most of the the Projects and Articles pages have completely
fucked formatting.
- There are no categories or tags for any posts.
I've done a lot of work adding new features and information, though.
- Comments are now hosted through Disqus
- RSS is now hosted through Feedburner. I've established
redirects to the old feeds, hope that doesn't screw anyone up.
- The Projects and Articles page is back online, with a few posts
that've been missing since 2007.
One of the other features is that Slashdong is now quite literally an
Open Source blog.
No, really, feel free to go fork it, it's at http://www.github.com/qdot/slashdong.org.
Everything is covered under the Creative Commons
Attibution-NonCommerical-NoDerivation license. Not really anything
special, since all of this data was very easily retreivable through
RSS or simple web scraping in the first place, but, well, it's there
now, if for some reason you feel the need to datamine 4 years of sex
tech posts or something.
If you find any problems with the site, please feel free to email the
tips address. Otherwise, here's hoping all this work was worth it.
