Custom Static Site Generator

Once again I've migrated this blog to a new backend - originally I had been using Octopress, then later I migrated to Pelican after I got fed up with the complicated setup and dependencies. Well, recently I had issues getting Pelican to work after some updates, so I decided to bite the bullet and write my own small static site generator: 開板.

Really it's just an excuse to play around with Rust and make it easier to customize my site, but if it means no more painful upgrades that's a nice side effect :D It also gave me a ...

New Backend, New Style

After being fed up with the intricate dance necessary to set up Ruby to get Octopress to run for quite some time, I decided that it was finally time to migrate to a better blogging system. A replacement was quickly found: Pelican. It's based on Python, quick and easy to install (no annoying version incompatabilities) and has a lot of nice plugins and themes.

Which gave me the excuse to go hunt for a nice clean theme - I had been jealous of all those minimalist blogs. So here it is, new blog, new theme, and - next post ...

Fighting Link Rot

Gwern's post on link rot got me thinking. Periodically checking links to see if they are broken is nice, but not really an adequate solution - content might already have disappeared by the time I realize. Besides, websites change a lot, in a year a site might look very different from what I linked to originally. This might be acceptable if I'm linking to the site in general, but unacceptable if linking to a very specific post.

Since I had a free Sunday morning anyway, I set out to create a Pelican Plugin that would automate this process for ...