State of This Blog

Table of Contents

• Technical Debt
• Revisit the Tech Stack
• Long Ride with Jekyll

This static blog is built using Jekyll in 2014. It survived after 7 years which is a success when it comes to personal blogging. Part of the reason is having a good blogging workflow: write posts in Org Mode, export to HTML with a front matter, build the site using Jekyll, send the folder to an Amazon S3 bucket, and that’s it. All done in Emacs of course.

Technical Debt

I added a few things to the workflow to enhance the reading experience including code highlights, centred images with caption, table of content etc. There are more features I want to add but at the same time, I want to be able to just write.

With that mindset, whenever there are issues, I apply quick fixes without a deep understanding of the actual causes. It seems efficient until recently some fixes become counter-productive.

I started seeing underscore (_) is exported as \_ and <p​> tag appears in code snippets. It all sounds like quick fix, but I just couldn’t get it correct after few hours. For the last few posts, I had to manually fix them for each of the read-edit-export-fix iteration.

Revisit the Tech Stack

I have an ambitious goal for this blog. So it is time to go sweep the carpet. I studied the technologies used for this blog, Jekyll, AWS and Org Mode exporting. It was a good chance to practise Org-roam for taking atomic notes. The time is well spent as I learnt a lot.

I was impressed I got the whole thing up and running 7 years ago. I don’t think I have the willpower to do it now.

Still, there are a lot of things that I do not have a good understand, e.g. the Liquid templates, HTML and CSS tags etc. The syntax just puts me off.

Long Ride with Jekyll

I prefer a simple format like Org Mode or Markdown and don’t have to deal with HTML/CSS at all. There are a couple of occasions when I cannot resist the temptation to look for an alternative to Jekyll. There’s no luck in the search. It seems HTML is the only way because it is native to the web.

So the plan is to stick with Jekyll for at least a few years. In the next couple of weeks, I’d try to fix all the issues, after that, gradually add more features to enhance the writing and reading experience.

I hope people who also uses the similar tech stack (Org-mode, Emacs, Jekyll, AWS) can benefit my work.