Last month or so I deleted everything I had posted on Cabaladadá so far. For more than a month, Business Cat gave the good news to every visitor.
I finally took a deep breath and decided to start working on the blog again. This is the “final” result. It’ll probably change over the years to come but this is a good starting point for someone who can barely code in CSS.
I wanted to make Cabaladadá more personal. It was too brainy, too serious. I couldn’t write because every time I tried to, it felt overwhelmingly painful. I realized I was trying to rewrite Goethe’s Faust every time I opened vim and I needed a fresh start. Now I can start having fun again (I hope).
There was something else annoying me. WordPress. But don’t get me wrong: I love WordPress, and I really recommend it if you’re new to blogging and wants something that is robust and customizable. It just wasn’t the right tool for me. The upgrades were distressing and, lately, something would often break. Also, my netbook isn’t very powerful, so the admin interface itself was too CPU-consuming.
And then I remembered of jekyll. dudektria introduced me to jekyll a long time ago. He later would recommend nanoc over jekyll but, I don’t know exactly why, I decided to go with the first one. Maybe because I had already installed it on my computer.
jekyll is beautiful. It is simple, I can write my posts in markdown and it converts them automatically to HTML, and I don’t need a fancy administration web interface. I can write plain text files using vim, and then upload a static website to my server. I can use git to keep track of changes. It is blogging the hacker way, and I love it.
It’s exactly what I wanted. Oh, and did I mention it’s written in Ruby?
Another decision that I had taken several months ago was that Cabaladadá should be in English. I probably read more English than Portuguese these days but I don’t get enough writing. Blogging is a great way to correct this. I may eventually publish in Portuguese or translate a few articles, but Cabaladadá will be mostly in Douglas Adams’ language.
Finally, I hope you like the terminal theme. It isn’t perfect yet—maybe the font is too big or too small depending on your browser—but I think it is simple and reflects this new phase of Cabaladadá: more hackerish, still nerdy, a bit technical, and certainly discordian.