inessential by Brent Simmons

Put weblogs on bitbucket

I’ve moved the repositories for inessential.com and ranchero.com to bitbucket and made them public read-only.

ranchero.com repository
inessential.com repository

It’s just the raw stuff that gets rendered into weblog posts — it’s not the rendering scripts. There’s no actual software. Just a bunch of words.

Not sure why I did this. Maybe just because I could. But sometimes big bunches of text can be useful for somebody somewhere.

The actual posts are in the posts directory. Older posts are HTML, newer posts are written in Markdown. The lines at the top of each post that start with a @ character are metadata. Stuff between [[ and ]] are macros. Stuff between [[= and ]] are includes (grabbed from Snippets folder).

I wrote about my system in early 2009 here. I’ve been quite happy with it. To restate the advantages:

  1. Static HTML pages are fast. I don’t have to worry about getting Fireballed. :) And they’re easily portable, if I ever have to change web hosts.

  2. Static RSS feeds are fast too, which is good because they get requested a lot.

  3. Having source control is especially nice when I’m working on templates.

  4. Having source control is great for offsite backups. (I was using Dropbox before I switched to bitbucket. I’ll probably still keep a backup on Dropbox, just because.)

  5. Being able to search through my weblogs on my desktop using Spotlight or ack is very convenient. (Okay, I admit I use ack mostly.)

  6. The system can generate a local preview version, so I can render my site just on my machine and look at it before uploading. I don’t use that often, but it’s nice when working on templates.

Best part: I still get to use MarsEdit — I have a small Ruby-based server that implements the API that MarsEdit expects. I hardly ever actually look at the weblogs as files-on-disk, and I never edit the posts that way (though I could).