New blog system = Twitter + Markdown
December 7, 2008
I’ve recently decided to try using Markdown to generate all of my web text. Unfortunately, I have very irregular deadlines in my life so the time I can devote to long entries varies greatly. On the flip side, I love using Twitter to keep people updated on events. So I’ve decided to combine longer entries into my Twitter feed which is much more likely to be updated. I used to have my twitter feed on my homepage and kept it separate from my tumblr blog (soon to be defunct). I’ve decided to combine the two with the use of some hash tags in my twitter feed and some server side python.
So now I have a directory of text files that represents the site structure and with a Python script I convert it and rsync it with my online site. Once I’m happy with the way one of my longer entries looks I will paste a link to it into my Twitter stream. To people following me on twitter it will appear just as any other link. On my website, the link will be automatically expanded inline into a longer entry. I also have an archive page which will hold pointers to all of the longer entries but is more or less empty right now.