The Road to Blog

The Past

Years back, I began posting blogs. At the start, I tried some blog platforms. Momentarily I was annoyed by the Ads and poor format. Thus, I switched to the Markdown with Hexo. And then lots of mark-up language and SSGs(static site generators).

Now to summarize, I did a review for some of them.

Markdown

Pros:

• In the beginning, easy to use.
• Exists many awesome SSG for it.
• Company with numerous SSGs, the choice of theme is correspondingly a lot.

Cons:

• Plenty of blogs use very identical template make me awkward to use the duplicate.
• When I want to customize, I have to fight with layouts and templates. I felt I was wasting my precious time on their domain-specific "languages".
• Markdown is somehow hard to learn and memorize. I felt I was writing some wired accent of HTML.

LaTeX

Pros:

• The de facto standard in the modern age for math formula printing.
• Has high-quality and stunning output for PDF format.

Cons:

• Excessive for blogging.
• When output to HTML, the quality degrades.

TeXmacs

Pros:

• Every goodness in LaTeX.
• Easier than LaTeX.

Cons:

• Crashes sometimes.
• Low speed in converting to HTML.

Org-mode

Pros:

• Marvellous extensibility.

Cons:

• Not easier than Markdown.

AsciiDoc, ReStructuredText, Creole, etc.

Pros:

• Differ from Markdown.
• Might be easier than Markdown.

Cons:

• SSGs' quality varies, often not good.
• When I want to write an SSG for them, I have to spend a lot of time on the parser.

The Present

Recently, I determined to restart blogging. I decided to build from scratch. When I was surfing the net, I happened to meet Gemini and its Gemtext format.

Gemini

Gemtext format

They immediately got my favour. Its simplicity makes me love it. So the Gemtext.

The simplicity let me write an SSG within a few hours, and I'm satisfied with it.

And for front-end stuff, I used Simple.css as a base and modified it.

For detail, see the style.css.

style.css

The future

Back to the future. :)

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