2016-02-07
For the last few years I've hosted my personal site as a collection of static html and css stylesheets over at AWS. It's never been anything fancy - just an index of links to my projects, resume, and social media sites.
But I've always thought it'd be fun to make a micro-blogging platform in the style of Marco.org or And Now It's All This, and I finally made it a priority. It's still very simple, but much more capable. And I'm a lot more likely to update and interact with it because of how it's designed to take in new information.
I decided to write it in Python using the Flask framework, host on Github Pages and write the posts in Markdown, which are then converted to html with the Flask flat-pages extension.
I set the site up to display both static pages and aggregate posts in a blog like style, which orders them based on date published. Using this markdown / flask combination allows me to quickly type up a document and push it to the server. This is an amazing combination. I can get a static page or blog-style post up as quickly as I can write it in a text file. It's even ridiculously easy to block some code out, just by indending by one tab in my text file. For example:
#Some R:
install.packages('cool')
library(cool)
for(i in vec){
do something cool
}
I wanted to make it as simple as possible to push content to the site, so if I ever get an idea, the workflow can be as simple as writing a new post, adding some tags that determine whether the page sits in the navigation bar or shows up as a blog post, save in the post directory, run the python freeze function, push to GitHub, and then reload my page to see it live in all its .md to .html converted glory.