Renovations

Date: 25 March 2012

I’ve been a busy PerlStalker this week. As you may have noticed, this site has changed somewhat. I’ve recently decided to drop Drupal and switch to IkiWiki. Drupal has been good to me but it’s really too heavy for my little blog. I have no use for most of the features that Drupal provides and it’s not worth it to me to keep it up-to-date.

IkiWiki has a couple of really nice things going for it. First, it spits out static pages. Except for search and comments, there’s no need for any dynamic content on my site. Google and Disqus fill both needs. I could use the IkiWiki CGI but there’s really no need.

Second, I can compose my posts in emacs org-mode. It beats the heck out of writing all of my posts in straight HTML. I had to jump through a few hoops to use org-mode but it’s working great now. I’ll post more on that later.

By default, IkiWiki uses a pretty nice syntax called markdown. I chose not to use it because org-mode is, in many ways, simpler and more powerful than markdown and I use it for all of my note taking and documentation at work.

Now, a little housekeeping. One of the drawbacks to moving to IkiWiki was that I was unable to get it to use the original posting dates from Drupal. All of the imported posts have a line at the top that has the original posting date.

Along those lines, you’ve probably already seen the slew of reposts in your feed reader. That’s a symptom of the conversion to IkiWiki. This should be the only time it’ll be a problem.

Thanks for reading.