This blog has now migrated from tumblr to GitHub Pages and has undergone some extensive re-work which hopefully will be completely unnoticeable to readers.
I started this blog in 2010 on the tumblr micro-blogging platform and it has largely served me well as a way of posting links and occasional longer-form thoughts. As I started thinking about posting longer-form technical articles, I realized that I needed more control over formatting and layout that tumblr probably wasn't going to be suitable for. I've also been less thrilled with tumblr's product design and strategic direction recently. I started defining requirements, looking into what improvements I would want, and started a (longer than expected) migration over a year ago.
Thanks to the tumblr2markdown and pytumblr open-source projects, I was able to download and reformat the majority of my historical tumblr content from HTML to Markdown or at least Markdown with inline HTML. I customized the scripts to remove smart quotes, change the format of link posts, automatically append permalinks and redirect URLs, and several other things.
The Markdown content is statically rendered by Jekyll. Why Jekyll as opposed to Gatsby or Hugo or Ghost or Wordpress? Honestly, I don't even remember at this point. Ghost and WordPress offered features I didn't need and I just picked a static site generator that seemed popular assuming the hardest part would be porting and reformatting all my content. This guide was a great help getting Jekyll running on Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) for local testing, though I'm still only able to get it running on Ubuntu 18 LTS.
I added the jekyll-paginate plugin to get pagination working and created custom layouts for posts, pages, tags, and the RSS feed. Along the way I fixed a cool flash-of-unstyled-content issue that made me feel like a real web developer.
The site is now hosted on GitHub Pages which came with a built-in capabilities for Jekyll build and publish and supported custom domains. I was also interested in and may still explore Cloudflare Pages in the future.
I built a custom GitHub Actions workflow that re-triggers the built-in GitHub Action that runs when new content is committed to the git repository to re-create the tumblr feature that regularly publishes one post a day. This enables me to queue up multiple posts with a front matter date in the future and have them published on schedule without manual intervention.
My workflow for publishing new posts is still my biggest pain-point. I created a custom iOS Shortcut that will create a GitHub issue such as this one containing the current website URL, currently-selected text as the pull-quote content, and allow me to supply a selection of tags. That can be copy/pasted into a new Markdown file and committed from a PC with only minor edits. I hope I can extend this to both allow editing the full document content before publishing and creating new files rather than issues or at least closing issues automatically after scheduled posts.
Honestly, the tumblr share functionality was really great.
Overall, I'm happy enough with the outcome. I like that I have a permanent copy of my content, that I'm more platform-independent, and that I have the flexibility to add new types of content in the future. Posting is less mobile-friendly but I can work on that.
You, dear reader, should see near-instantaneous performance; a perfect 100 score on performance, accessibility, and best practices from Google PageSpeed Insights; a validated Atom-compliant feed that works as intended in RSS readers like Feedly; and no third-party scripts, cookies, or tracking, which you can validate with The Markup's Blacklight.
You'll hopefully see some more in-depth technical posts from me soon, including posts providing more details on some of the comments above. For now, you'll probably see a set of older headlines that I think are still valuable to share being flushed out of my tumblr drafts. You will definitely see a return to regular posting after 8 months (sorry!). Onwards and upwards!