¡Adios Blogger! and hello to a lean and simple publishing platform that I can bend to my will. Wordpress/Blogger/Drupal are certainly interesting for some complex use cases, but for my own blog I grew tired of their weight, complexity, and hack-unfriendliness.

So I assembled a saner bow using wood species I like. Here is how it works:

• Chisel does the publishing. With less than 150 lines of Python code, it matches my requirements of simplicity and hackability. Chisel relies on:
  • Markdown as the input format.
  • jinja2 for the html templating.
  • PyRSS2Gen to generate my RSS feed, integrated as a publishing step in Chisel.
• I edit my posts as Markdown files, in SublimeText on PC, and Textastic on iPad.
• To publish, I just move my md file to my Dropbox/Blog folder.
• A cron job somewhere detects the change, launches the chiseling, and deploys.
• Lolcats and unicorns.

Migration of my Blogger data was done using:

• A bunch of replacement regexes in SublimeText to clean the input XML.
• A modified version of the neat wordpress2octopress script. Though not exactly adapted to my case, it was easy to bend.

That was done in one weekend, and I have a few things to say:

1. Python is beautiful: strict in what it does, and liberal in what it accepts.
2. Regexes are as beautiful as they are hard. But hey, they can save the world!
3. Feel free to use my junk on GitHub: modified Chisel, xml2markdown
4. Props to the authors of the great software I'm relying upon :)