Months ago, and once again, i spent hours to figure out how to do things i expected to be simple. In this case, Jekyll isn't the one to blame: the ruby ecosystem is. I'm a happy CPAN user and contributor as well as cabal happy user. Coming from those world, the ruby one is quiet messy.

So i decided to throw all the blog/wiki engines away, running a temporary solution with the simplest bootstrap i can write. Following the rules of the unix KISS principles, i divided the "CMS" problem more little ones. I needed something as simple as possible to extend coming with:

• a content generator
• a conductor to drive it
• a responsive design
• a web browsable SCM
• an atom generator
• a discus-like comment system

so i choose the simplest (or best) tools i know for each task:

• pandoc to generate html content from md files. I don't know about the internals but both the CLI tool and the haskell API are very pleasant to use.
• make is my conductor. As i really expect the every so-called unix users have the basics of make. It get the job done for many decades now. I also have a look on mk from the 9base.
• git as SCM, lot of tools out there to browse it from the web.
• Unsemanic CSS framework. I don't know a lot about web development but i was aware about Responsive web design and saw the ancestor of unsemantic was in the roadmap of werc (when it comes to simplicity, you really can trust the cat-v Ayatollahs^wpeople)
• more recently, i wrote atombomb to add atom feeds to some sites.

so the workflow is:

• create a new md for a new page
• manually maintain the atom feed ( atombomb format is quiet helpfull for this part)
• run make to build a section
• git submodules to add subsection
• rsync or git to push on the server

you can see all the revision by using a git browser (like the github one) and i plan to use an ajax call the powerfull sympa list manager to run a discus-like comment system.

Months passed and it became clear i will not step back: those 62 LOC (it takes less than 5 minutes to understand the whole thing) never desapointed me.

• the publishing process is faster and easier
• i use the :make command of vim
• my working directory is served by a local http server
• everything is relative to the working directory: if it renders well here, it will render well offline. faster and easier local preview before pushing
• so easy to extend i never was stuck by a new problem, i just had to write some few extra lines in the Makefile to get new features like
• graphviz and ditaa) support
• beamer slides (using the theme of my university).
• render html report from external sources (just use pandoc md as intermediate representation and run make)

Actually, even my todolist/notes system is now based on it (in combination with vim and mutt i'll explain in another post) and as always, i realized how happy i am when i follow the rules of the unix KISS principles.

    # wc -l M* t* 
      28 [Makefile](https://github.com/eiro/eiro.github.com/blob/master/Makefile)
      27 [template.html5](https://github.com/eiro/eiro.github.com/blob/master/template.html5)
       7 theme.css
      62 total

the only thing i was afraid was "all is relative to the working directory" thing: i copy the css files for each new section. suprisingly, it has benefic effects.

• i think twice before adding a section and it keep me aware of the content.
• the local CSS actually import a stylesheet shared by all the sites i manage so i can easily
  maintain the whole stuff.

So another unix principle is at work here: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil". Thanks Donald!

(2014-01-18T22:08:52+01:00) atom bomb first test

i decided to push a repository on github with all those tests and notes that can maybe become a project some day and named it labo.

this feed is generated with atom bomb and the feed file i just maintain manually with vim and simple zsh helper to create headers.

atom bomb (i'm not sure about the name) is written in perl5 and Eirotic.pm which replace my common boilerplate:

• Perlude
• Method::Signatures
• perl 5.14 with strictures
• YAML

markdown conversion is made by pandoc.