ubill.github.io

Well then, after getting satisfied with the output from the tools I'm using to author and generate this blog, I guess it's time for the public announcement of this blog.

As for the layout (theme) Two Things here, as a reminder to self:

1. The theme of this site could be changed. But right now, just started getting into it, and I am of the opinion that it is quite good at what it needs to do (which is, all of what I need it to do at this moment), so I would just continue to use it at this moment¹.

2. View in mobile browsers could be improved, especially on pages with the 'embedded slides'. To the credit of the Javascript of the slides though, they do handle very well the touch-input of mobile devices, so that's definitely one less big item to worry about.

Alright, now that we got that... what's the raison d'être³ of this blog?

This blog came about because I was learning this programming language Erlang and I needed a place to type in stuff and review it easily. Of course, wanting one thing leads to (having to do) another and so on... before you could even get something that you feel you could use satisfactorily.

• "need a place to type in stuff and review it easily" necessarily meant that.. you needed a place where you could in the first place "type in stuff easily".
• Blogspot seems easy enough, and of course I have used it in all my years on the Internets... but layout, formatting and typing/pasting in code snippets seems to be quite cumbersome. There are of course some Javascript-based solutions (SyntaxHighlighter) but somehow I never caught on with using it.
• Secondly, for Blogspot, I have to maintain my content and formatting in HTML... all the HTML markup mixed together with my content while I'm typing it just seems distracting and diverting when I'm writing the content. Later on, I used Sphinx (the Python tool for generating documentation) and the workflow seemed appealing to me. So, the current toolchain I'm using for authoring is pretty similar to that.
• In the interim (read: for the longest time) I used Facebook Notes, which is of course built-in to Facebook and of course very convenient... until you want to search for that old post. You have to load every single post that you've ever written to get to that post, and there's no calendar or archive view. I still use it quite regularly for some quick and easy notes though. ('notes', as its name would suggest its raison d'être to be.)

If I needed to sum it up in one word about why I chose to author a blog in this way, it would be this word: maintainability.

Alright, so now... on with the show!