Blogger and blogging
To me, it doesn't seem that long ago, but I wrote the first post on this blog ten months ago. Funnily enough, it discussed what I'm thinking about right now: how best to blog.
Writing using the Blogger editor is not a great experience. Not great, but adequate. It removes that the need for the user to know HTML. With that, it also removes the possibility to do anything beyond the limited formatting you get with that. (Some of my use cases, for instance, include highlighting code/command lines to offset them from text, and using footnotes.)
I've had a couple of instances where, largely through my own fault, I've been switching between posts, hitting back and ended up wiping out my work. After those experiences, I decided to just draft posts in a text editor, then paste in and markup the HTML.
I find it quite clunky to mark up text posts as HTML, even basic things like paragraphs need tagging, and having to open and close tags constantly starts getting distracting. After speaking with drj this week about him considering migrating his Wordpress blog to Jekyll, I had the inspiration of starting to write blog posts in Markdown and then converting them to HTML.
What's Markdown?
You might be asking that if you're not a developer. I hadn't heard of it at all before I started using GitHub, but I'm a convert now. It's a no-nonsense tool that converts plain text to HTML. Grab your drink of choice and spend the whole five minutes you'll need to learn to use it. There are several online editors like this one that you can test out.
Adding formatting is really simple, for instance, *putting text between asterisks* in Markdown would make it italic. It means you can focus on writing, instead of getting distracted fiddling around with HTML tags.
Furthermore, there are fantastic tools such as pandoc that will convert Markdown to a host of other outputs too, e.g. PDF via LaTeX, Word docx, LibreOffice, even the epub ebook format.
What next?
After finding that I prefer writing posts in Markdown, my next thought was: why not remove the middleman and use a system, like Jekyll, that directly uses Markdown?
I'm feeling this particularly so now, given that I'm starting to feel like Blogger is limiting. By default, the provided Blogger templates look dated. (And feature some odd design choices too: why is text in a h2 tag smaller than that in a h3 tag?) I've not had time to start trying to modify it or look for a better one. When I see my posts look beautiful in an online Markdown preview, and then sending them to the horrors of my (pretty much stock) Blogger template where they are rendered so unappealing is always going to make me sigh.
The content is the most important thing, of course, but a poorly designed website is always going to distract.
It's also clunky to try to customise certain aspects of Blogger, and having my own blog setup might simplify this. Being completely in control of my blog, rather than having parts of it in hidden black boxes appeals too. One example is that someone reading an article commented that the mobile version of the blog was irritating because it disabled zooming; nothing that I could do really do about that.
This isn't to take away from Blogger being an easy way to get started. It's simple to use and definitely helped me share my writing. Without having to worry about choosing a host and managing some blogging system, it was easy to get going. Login to your Google account and a few clicks will get your first post published. It being free of charge helps too.
So, I now have a project whenever I have a free weekend next: look into static site blogging with Jekyll/Octopress (Ruby based) or perhaps Pelican (Python based) and hosting on GitHub Pages. I'll definitely write up what I find.
Finally, why consider these static site generators, and not my originally suggested move to WordPress? WordPress itself is free to use, but hosting WordPress somewhere costs money. It also gets me into the quagmire of shopping around for a host and hosting plan, and managing security updates. Once the static page generator is initially setup, I can deploy the site to GitHub Pages, then focus on writing again.