Markdown my words#

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 22:31:00 +0000

As a concept, this blog dates back to November 2001 - though I note now reviewing the first few entries, I was back then quite emphatic in my claim that it was not a blog. How times change.

In that time it has been implemented with

• flat HTML files and a couple of elisp functions, from 2001
• a Common Lisp-based server probably based on Araneida but i don't remember much about
• a Ruby script based on Soks, an early Ruby Wiki system, from ~ 2005? I think?
• my-way - a different Ruby script that I wrote myself
• yablog - a Clojure program which set out to be "a two-hour Tuesday morning hack" and apparently took a week

What's notable about Yablog is that it took a week in 2015 and has scarely been touched since, until yesterday, when I decided to add Markdown support. For the last 15 years (ever since I switched to Soks, bascially) I've been writing blog entries using Textile, and for the most recent ~ 10 of them, the blog entries are pretty much the only thing I've been writing in Textile, so this change is long overdue. I was getting a bit fed up of writing backticks and then publishing entries before remembering that Textile uses @ signs for that instead.

A year or so ago I suddenly realised that for the first time in a long time I no longer have a favourite programming language, but it's been apparent to me for a while before that that Clojure isn't it any longer anyway. That said, I must admit I'm quite happy that I can pick up a ~ 6 year old project, update the dependency versions and hack this in, all in the space of a couple of hours. I have trouble imagining that the same would be true in Ruby.

(Ruby isn't it either. But Ruby has never been it)

Shoutout to @yogthos@mastodon.social for markdown-clj which did all the hard work already.