blog.tibidat.com

I just moved my blog over to GitHub. The main reasons for moving are:

• Moving another ‘critical’ components off the VPS and into the cloud. With this, the server can safely be used for experimenting, without fear of killing my blog or email server. It should be noted, that this is only necessary since I have been too lazy to write provisioning scripts, which means that resetting the server is currently rather tedious.
• It allows me to try out jekyll, all the while enjoying the streamlined deployment offered by GitHub pages. It also gives me a good starting point to add a GitHub-based commenting system, which is currently in the planning stage.

With regards to the GitHub-based comments, there are currently a number of people using a GitHub issues based approach. I personally dislike it, as comments are removed from the actual content you are commenting on. My plan is to base commenting on GitHub commit-comments. The system would roughly work as follows:

1. Grab the permalink of a post and extrapolate the path to its source file
2. Retrieve all commits for said file through the GitHub API
3. Iterate over the commits and retrieve any comments from the API
4. Display a comment-count on the index (click to fade-in the actual comments); display all comments contents on the permalink page

Along with the switch to jekyll, I also opted to redesign the blog. It now has a very simplistic design, which I believe offers good readability and makes good use of screen real-estate.