I didn’t really have a place to pre-announce changes to my repos, so I made one.

This spawned a small adventure through staticgen in order to find a static site generator. I really wanted it to run on Win64, because I have to fire up a VM to update propaganda since it was built for a POSIX world. For style points, I went for ones written in languages I already have installed.

So after trying Hugo, Sculpin, Phrozn, and Pelican, the last one happened to be a winner.

I’m kind of sad Hugo didn’t work out, since it seems fast and nicely built, but I couldn’t get it to understand about generating pages with relative URLs so that I could preview them with the theme applying properly.

One of the PHP frameworks wasn’t PHAR-aware, and tried to use DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR to build the path of an XML file to load… but that creates an invalid URL when DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR isn’t ‘/’.

Pelican has its warts, to be sure (there’s no real themes gallery, just a bunch of githubs with screenshots of varying quality) but it’s working and I can work with it. And I’m not locked into keeping all my pages on github because Octopress is secretly managing the repository for me; I wrote my own publish script. Although magic is convenient, it turns out that I always want to understand the next layer down. Even if it’s just a small bit of knowledge I never use, it’s comforting to know I wouldn’t be hopelessly adrift if GitHub Pages closed down.

Anyway, look for future updates about my repositories here on sapphirecat.github.io. I want to get away from the “randomly dump breaking changes on an unsuspecting world” model of development.