I spent about 30 minutes talking to my wife about how excited I was to do this. It’s been a long time since I’ve been excited to write online again.

When I first started writing online, it was 2002. I was between jobs (what was the beginning of a 6-month hiatus from the employed world) and I was poking around OS X. I remember reading this article on O’Reilly about serving Web pages using the built-in apache Web server in Mac OS X 10.1. At the end of the article was a suggestion to install this thing called Movable Type. It was my first foray into blogs. I soon got it running on my iBook G3 and eventually set up a site at Blacksun. I blogged consistently for about 3 years. Late in 2004, licensing decisions by SixApart forced me to re-evaluate my use of MovableType. I chose Dean Allen’s TextPattern.

In retrospect, the move was unwarranted, most of the licensing stuff with MovableType were resolved in the 3.2 point-release. The only thing that changing systems really did was interrupt my writing.

Since TextPattern, I’ve used WordPress, ExpressionEngine and finally found some consistent success with Drupal. I have found things to like on all platforms.

However, I wrote less and less–and when I did, I was usually angry at something (in Drupal’s case, it was Drupal itself). In actuality, I fiddled with code more and more. It was enjoyable, but code never provided the same voice and outlet for me as keeping an online journal.

Enter Baked Goodness

One of the cool things about MovableType was that your site was statically generated each time you made a post. The Perl script would create a multitude of HTML files, write hundreds hyper-linking and cross-linking and comment management every time you hit the publish button. One great thing is that I have all my posts in HTML. It’s very easy to keep the same URLS when all you need to do is point to static HTML.

I suppose this became passé with the drive to database driven websites.

One of the emerging trends that I am seeing is a more back-to-basics approach using scripting languages to publish static content. For a simple blog, it is more than enough.

I looked at several systems:

• Jekyll – Ruby-based, good documentation and large community.
• Hyde – Python-based, horrible documentation, but good community.
• Blogofile– Kind of like Hyde, also written in Python.
• Stacey – A PHP version that requires you scaffold your site using your file system.

I ended up going with Jekyll as the community have really tried hard to put together comprehensive documentation.

Tai