I have been ranting about editors in the past few months, an year after considering shutting the blog down. After some more thinking out and fighting, I have now a better plan and the blog is not going away.
First of all, I decided to switch my editing to Draft and started paying for a subscription at $3.99/month. It’s a simple-as-it-can-be editor, with no pretence. It provides the kind of “spaced out” editing that is so trendy nowadays and it provides a so-called “Hemingway” mode that does not allow you to delete. I don’t really care for it, but it’s not so bad.
More importantly it gets the saving right: if the same content is being edited in two different browsers, one gets locked (so I can’t overwrite the content), and a big red message telling me that it can’t save appears the moment I try to edit something and the Internet connection goes away or I get logged out. It has no fancy HTML editor, and instead is designed around Markdown, which is what I’m using nowadays to post on my blog as well. It supports C-i and C-b with it just fine.
As for the blog engine I decided not to change it. Yet. But I also decided that upgrading it to Publify is not an option. Among other things, as I went digging trying to fix a few of the problems I’ve been having I’ve discovered just how spaghetti-code it was to begin with, and I lost any trust in the developers. Continuing to build upon Typo without taking time to rewrite it from scratch is in my opinion time wasted. Upstream’s direction has been building more and more features to support Heroku, CDNs, and so on so forth — my target is to make it slimmer so I started deleting good chunks of code.
The results have been positive, and after some database cleanup and removing support for structures that never were implemented to begin with (like primary and hierarchical categories), browsing the blog should be much faster and less of a pain. Among the features I dropped altogether is the theming, as the code is now very specific to my setup, and that allowed me to use the Rails asset pipeline to compile the stylesheets and javascripts; this should lead to faster load time for all (even though it also caused a global cache invalidation, sorry about that!)
My current plan is to not spend too much time on the blog engine in the next few weeks, as it reached a point where it’s stable enough, but rather fix a few things in the UI itself, such as the Amazon ads loading that are currently causing some things to jump across the page a little too much. I also need to find a new, better way to deal with image lightboxes — I don’t have many in use, but right now they are implemented with a mixture of Typo magic and JavaScript — ideally I’d like for the JavaScript to take care of everything, attaching itself to data-fullsize-url attributes or something like that. But I have not looked into replacements explicitly yet, suggestions welcome. Similarly, if anybody knows a good JavaScript syntax highligher to replace coderay, I’m all ears.
Ideally, I’ll be able to move to Rails 4 (and thus Passenger 4) pretty soon. Although I’m not sure how well that works with PostgreSQL. Adding (manually) some indexes to the tables and especially making sure that the diamond-tables for tags and categories did not include NULL entries and had a proper primary key being the full row made quite the difference in the development environment (less so in production as more data is cached there, but it should still be good if you’re jumping around my old blog posts!)
Coincidentally, among the features I dropped off the codebase I included the update checks and inbound links (that used the Google Blog Search service that does not exist any more), making the webapp network free — Akismet stopped working some time ago and that is one of the things I want to re-introduce actually, but then again I need to make sure that the connection can be filtered correctly.
By the way, for those who are curious why I spend so much time on this blog: I have been able to preserve all the content I could, from my first post on Planet Gentoo in April 2005, on b2evolution. Just a few months shorts of ten years now. I also was able to recover some posts from my previous KDEDevelopers blog from February that years and a few (older) posts in Italian that I originally sent to the Venice Free Software User Group in 2004. Which essentially means, for me, over ten years of memories and words. It is dear to me and most of you won’t have any idea how much — it probably also says something about priorities in my life, but who cares.
I’m only bothered that I can’t remember where I put the backup from blogspot I made of what I was writing when I was in high school. Sure it’s not exactly the most pleasant writing (and it was all in Italian), but I really would like for it to be part of this single base. Oh and this is also the reason why you won’t see me write more on G+ or Facebook — those two and Twitter are essentially just a rant platform to me, but this blog is part of my life.