Almost one year till the Nazis from the Moon invade the Earth, quite some time. Haven’t heard of it yet?
Check out ironsky.net. You really get the feeling this films’ indie-crew from finland means business.
I like the second teaser a bit better, though.
Really? A blogpost in which I praise Hamburg, spring/summer1 and my life in between?
On one hand, there’s nothing more trivial than the weather. But on the other hand, there’s nothing more elementary. I first realized it some time ago, when there were a few days that felt like summer, but it wasn’t quite there yet. Going by bike to school/work/university is awesome, even in the winter. But in the summer, it really is off the chart. It’s a vivid feeling of freedom and flexibility, I feel in touch with the city and people who live here, I just get into a good mood.2 Just great, I love it. There’s the beach at the Elbe, there’s all the nice places around the Alster. I love days that consist of having a barbecue, having good conversations, drinking some beers and eating delicious, tasty meat.
Here’s the mini-cherry on top of the regular cherry on top of the sundae of awesomeness that is my life:3 I just wrote this, sitting in the sun in front of the lecture hall.
So: Yes indeed.
Three? Are you going to name all your posts like some Led Zeppelin wanna-be rockband’s albums?
No. It’s not a bug3, it’s a feature. You may have noticed that there’s no ‘About this Blog’ in the navigation on the right. I intend to add such a page and then link to all the numbered posts on it. Then, every time I change or add something, I’ll add a new numbered post. The result: This blog’s real history instead of a static page that never is up to date or just reflects the current state. If you as a visitor want to know who I am, there already is the ‘About’ link to my Personal Page. That’s my plan for now, if I change it, guess what kind of title the post will have.
This one’s too big for a list entry. As you may have realized, currently there are no comments on this blog. Two things.
A jekyll-based blog doesn’t have a database, so comments don’t work out of the box. But there’s the cloud and in it there’s Disqus, so that’s no problem.
Regarding the want-part: I think a blog should fuel collaboration, communication, comments, and feedback. But it can do so without comments directly under every post. There’s no lack of channels for discussion nowadays, even without them. The lack of comments is likely to encourage people to start their own blog and write about their opinion, or at least send you a tweet or an email, one might say. Oh, how I’d want this to be true.
I think that without comments, people really are more likely to do one of the mentioned things. But the overall barrier to do anything as a reaction to what they just read is much higher without comments. And I’d like some feedback. For me, that’s what the whole pro/con comments discussion boils down to. At least if you like participation and feedback as I do. All of that, of course, depends on who your audience is and to which extent you have a ‘my blog, my space’ picture in mind4.
I haven’t decided yet. For now, maybe I’ll add a ‘Contact’ link to the navigation, so when someone reads a blogpost and wants to insult me there’s a list of all the channels one click away, without the detour by the Personal Page.
Oh, and how could I close on this article without mentioning Iven’s take on it?
When I first thought about my new blog, the only options for me were: WordPress, Tumblr, maybe posterous. That was until Iven told me about ‘baked blogs’. What? - Yeah, that’s what I thought, too.
Let me explain: In this analogy, the previously mentioned platforms ‘fry’ the blog in the second one requests them from the web server. They generate every page in the blog via PHP, I believe. Blogs served that way are ‘fried blogs’.
Guess what: The server doesn’t have to generate static files. So your blog has a fighting chance of staying online, even when it gets fireballed.
Of course one can cache the fried files so they can be served more efficiently, and you lose the advantages of hosted platforms, i.e. blogging from on the road.
But in which universe does that bother me? Most certainly, my blog will never get fireballed or sweat a tear under heavy load of hundreds of thousands of visitors. I’m not that into web server stuff that I could’t bear with what some people may call an unsophisticated solution. So?
What made me consider a baked blog more seriously was that with wordpress, I always had the feeling to utilize something I didn’t understand entirely. Using wordpress is simple, but to customize it is much harder. Therefore it’s likely you just use it in a very standard way. That’s ok for most people, I would suggest that for nearly everyone who’s inclined to dive into the world of blogging. Which I strongly suggest, too.
I, for my part, knew that I would be able to teach myself (or: remind) enough HTML and CSS to code something suitable for a static file generator (that’s how you call the things that bake your blog). I knew that the second I heard of baked blogs, even thought I didn’t realize it immediately.
Now, my blog only contains code I wrote myself or ripped off somebody else’s git repository, knowing what it does and where to put it. To me, that’s very appealing.
Why did I chose Jekyll? At first I didn’t want to. After Iven told me about baked blogs, I listened to an episode of Build & Analyze (this one, but the following ones also fit the topic) in which Marco Arment (the Instapaper guy) talked about his plans to release his self-written static site generator, ‘Second Crack’ on github. I also am a coffee nut, so its name (a specific point of time in the roasting process of coffee) made me want to use it. In the end, the idea that I was using this as an excuse to put the whole project off became a certainty, so I chose Jekyll, and here I am.
To be acurate: If you’re interested in this topic, you propably want to read Brent Simmons’ piece on it: A plea for baked weblogs