The foolish rantings of custom blogging software

Thrilling content lies beyond these words.

This is a test of my new CMS blog program, blobber. Blobber is written in 100% C, and is comic-book rocket fast.

I wrote blobber out of frustration with Jekyll. It was driving me crazy. I thought that in the time it would take me to get Jekyll working again, I could write something that would be faster and smaller. I’m very happy with the result. I’m tired of fighting 400 Ruby libraries that Jekyll seems to be useless without.

Still learning markdown, though. I like the idea. It’s sort of like HTML for programmers. I’ve never been super crazy about XML or HTML. It’s tough to parse, and readability is very poor.

Markdown isn’t perfect, but it’s much more readable. Blobber doesn’t support markdown out of the box, but with a quick shell script it becomes easily digestible for blobber to mess with.

Here’s some features of blobber:

• Easy to learn. Blobber has like 3 features.
• More UNIX-y than other blog systems. It expects to be part of a bigger system.
• The static database advantages of Jekyll, without the dynamic overhead.

The last one is a biggie. Blobber easily sorts posts, keeps them organized, and keeps all the tags and indices straight.

I like to blog about stuff that I code, so good syntax highlighting is important. It turns out it’s pretty easy.

Code in C looks like this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main()
{
    /* printf() string to stdout */
    printf("Hello, World.");
    return 0;
}

Pretty sweet, eh? Why incorporate a parser and write a lexer when the work has already been done (several times?)

I know that last statement is a bit silly, considering that I wrote blobber in response to Jekyll. However, I really like blobber better. It’s very simple, so I can write a bunch of shell scripts to make whatever kind of site I want. Blobber makes it easy to keep my content separate from my code.

In the future, this blog will feature more posts about programming and general purpose data design. Sooner or later I’ll get around to posting blobber on github too.

Posted on Mar-3-2018.
filed under: i hate jekyll,blobber,c programming