I didn't know this old blog was still alive and available https://stevenrosenberg.nfshost.com/blog/

[passthejoe@snac.bsd.cafe]

I didn't know this old blog was still alive and available https://stevenrosenberg.nfshost.com/blog/

[passthejoe@snac.bsd.cafe]

And I just brought back this one -- a microblog that I used to feed with a custom script (that also posted to Twitter and Mastodon):

http://passthejoeupdates.nfshost.com/

[passthejoe@snac.bsd.cafe]

I really miss this one. I had a huge Ruby script that made it easy to make the entries and post them to 3 different sites (one of which was this microblog), and I liked seeing all my social posts in one place.

Ode -- the blogging software -- was something. The guy who made it, Rob Reed, kind of dropped out of site. He never really updated it after this 2010 release, but it did a lot and worked pretty well.

It was kind of out of time in that it was a Perl CGI app that seemed to be based on Blosxom (https://blosxom.sourceforge.net/), but extended it. Rob also wanted to use the system to teach programming and system administration. It zigged when everyone else was zagging toward static site generators. I eventually did, too, though I never got all of the entries in the main blog into my Hugo or Zola sites.

While I liked the immediacy of writing a file and having it publish automatically (because every user got a fresh site built by the Perl script), you pretty much had to have an Apache server so .htaccess could work its magic. I think the few users of Ode over the years tried to make the script work on other web servers, but those efforts are lost to history, as all the forums we used are very likely gone forever. I might have notes on some of this, but ...

I'm still more sold on static site generators, even though the front matter is generally too complicated (true for both Hugo and Zola, bu t not as true for @bt@bsd.cafe's wruby, which I think is real contender). I generally use templates or scripts to generate the raw post files, so that's a solved problem.

But as you can see, I wrote 800+ entries on that main Ode blog, and there are a few thousand on the microblog. It obviously worked for me, and I'd like to have that many (hopefully good) entries in a blog that I was currently writing.

[passthejoe@snac.bsd.cafe]

The kind of immediate writing I did in that microblog -- which went to Mastodon anyway -- was easy because I used a script in the terminal is better done in a "real" microblog like snac2, but it's nice to have an archive of what I was thinking (and typing into my Ruby script).

I haven't done a programming project like it (https://github.com/passthejoe/blogPoster) ever since, and I should. I want to do something that's a desktop GUI, and programs that help me write and publish blog posts with less friction still have a lot of appeal.

The social media paradigm of "type into the box, hit send" is still pretty powerful. All the things you need to add to a post (title, tags, categories, images) just makes everything take longer, and in my case it makes me write less, or write fewer shorter posts. That's good or bad, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

I still think @bt@bsd.cafe has the right idea with his simpler static site blogging systems https://btxx.org/projects/

[passthejoe@snac.bsd.cafe]

I brought back a few more sites by re-aiming DNS for my domains at an #AlmaLinux 9 VPS that runs the #Caddy web server and did some builds in #Hugo and #Zola, so now I'm also running:

https://passthejoe.net
https://zola.passthejoe.net
https://stevenrosenberg.net
https://wruby.passthejoe.net

I have been maintaining this VPS in terms of doing updates, but I didn't know I still had the web server running, and at least one of these domains was already aimed at it. Now all 4 are working.

I thought I would give up the server, but I like the ease with which I can add sites in Caddy, and it's been a very reliable environment. It's a low-RAM VPS -- 512 MB -- so I had to set up a swap file just to get it to dnf upgrade. There's enough RAM to run the web server, but it's no powerhouse.