I rewrote my blog engine (again): welcome, Cripslock#

Sat Jul 26 20:34:36 2025

Topics: fennel

'In my experience Miss Cripslock tends to write down exactly what one says,' Vetinari observed. 'It's a terrible thing when journalists do that. It spoils the fun. One feels instinctively that it's cheating, somehow'

In preparation for rearranging and pouring in a bunch of fediverse threads from an archive of the recently defunct Pleroma server at brvt.telent.net, I have rewritten (again) the software that shows you this blog.

Previously, previously, previously

it was that or figure out how to rebuild and reverse-engineer the ten-year old Clojure program it replaces. New features are the topic/keyword/tag thing you see in the sidebar on the right, and a new syntax for making links between one page and another: my intention is that it's going to get more "timeless" posts (mostly, for the moment, about motorcycles), and so I need better ways to expose that stuff. Something a bit like a Bliki.

(A planned new feature is site search, because Google isn't what it once was)

Visually I carried forward all the CSS from the old site so you probably won't notice much difference there. The service itself is written in Fennel because well mostly because why not?. I had to write a Textile parser again, using an ugly combination of Lua patterns and Lpeg, but Markdown is provided by lcmark.

Points of note:

my mental model of Textile is divergent in several ways from the Textile spec's model of Textile, and as the rôle of Textile in this software is to display posts that I wrote, my interpretation is deemed locally correct. This is another reason the Textile processing is home-grown and I didn't just, say, use Pandoc to turn it into Markdown.
cqueues is fun. Cripslock has an HTTP server and also an inotify thing so it can refresh when posts are added/changed, and it's quite slick to be able to put them in the same event loop. (The side project that I temporarily put down to write Cripslock (which is itself a side project from Liminix which is my hobby when I am not at $WORK) mashes up cqueues and glib in an inelegant way, so it was neat to see how it should work)
the initial topic tagging was done with grep and sed and is probably quite low-quality
in the ~ 25 years since I started writing this blog (ever since the first post insisting that it was in fact not a blog - hindsight is wonderful, no?) I have never specified licence terms except to add a copyright notice. So, technically, I suppose, that would mean no copying and arguably no copying would also mean no reading - because it's in the nature of transmitting it across the internet that copies end up being made at both ends and quite likely also in the middle. I intend to rectify this, and also, if I can find some well-written canned licences that meet my needs, to make it explicit that I am not permitting its use for training LLMs.