This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch. You can also follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon.
Tap tap. Is this thing on? [... clears throat ...] Well, I'm back.
Who among you noticed I didn't blog for over four years? [No hands are raised. Nobody even pays attention.] Right.
The story is boring. I used to run Movable Type, an old Perl blogging system, from 2003, when I started blogging, to 2021, when my ISP shut down. My original plan for moving to another ISP failed miserably. With only days on the clock I had to jump to an essentially random ISP who didn't support Perl, but did offer Wordpress.
So now I was left with no blog, but with this big blue 'Install Wordpress' button (div?) that both enticed and frightened me. I never felt comfortable pressing it. I didn't want Wordpress to take over the non-blog part of this site — I still run that by hand-coding HTML and FTP-ing it to the server — and it can't generate static HTML pages out of the box.
Then Paul van Buuren told me a partial install was possible, and there was a plugin for creating static pages. That sounded a lot better. So I decided to do a partial install for blogging purposes only, with the static page plugin — later.
But later became never.
Then I switched ISPs again, to get rid of the passive-aggressive tone of my old one, and because Jan van Hellemond, who now helps me out with the conferences, recommended it for various reasons. I moved over the conference sites a few weeks ago, and this week QuirksMode followed.
I asked Jan for advice on a blogging system, and this week it turned out he'd created a simple one himself. It's so new it doesn't even have a name. Let's see if it works. If you can read this it does.
So here I am, typing away in my static HTML file that I've always used to preview my blogposts in. Once I'm done I'll publish it with the newfangled publication system (really only an upload and a shell command). It's still a confusing process because it's so new to me, but it feels better than a massive Wordpress install.
And I may have something useful to say about CSS, once I've done some tests.
And BBEdit still remembers the macros I need for my blogging, such as Shift+Option+A for an external link, and Option+- for an em-dash.
It's good to be back.
