Launch of yet another blog

What's new about this blog??

Hopefully some ideas on this blog will be new, or just fun. It's also for myself to keep a track of certain stuff. About the blog itself, it doesn't use typical blog or CMS software. It uses C++, and has interfaces to other tools. I created this system in a few hours this weekend, it's quite minimal.

How does it work? I have to run Xming on my windows box, and request from the administration panel of the blog a management console. This opens a C++ program developed using DialogBlocks (my best software-buy ever!!) / wxWidgets. In this application I can add sites, and choose what categories should be dispatched to it. This is the weirdest part I guess, no regular login + management through a webinterface.

Why do I do it like this? First of all I don't like to write HTML. That's why I can define a (simple) site template with a HAML and SASS, and add some markers in it for replacement.

Demo snippet from the screenshot:

(defun factorial (n)
  (if (<= n 1)
    1
    (* n (factorial (- n 1)))))

The editor simply has a listing of articles, which are stored in multimarkdown syntax. (note: this format is actually easily converted to LaTeX pdf documents as well!(works like a charm)). I have made some facilities to make it easy to add i.e. C++ or other code-snippets (they can be editted in separate files). Using this code prettifyer by Mike Samuel. They will be represented by a string like (lisp-code filename), and if I use that in the markdown document it will place syntax highlighted code with the snippet there. I made something similar for images and some meta-data with regards to the articles is stored using TinyXML.

In the editor I can request gvim or xemacs to edit the markdown (or a snippet), or use the one build-in.

Lastly, I can (re)generate (parts of- or the entire-)website. It will convert HAML files to HTML. Markdown to HTML. Merge the snippets, merge articles with main html. And the website is updated.

Update 19-7-2012

• Now it processes all JPG's through imageconvert to compress them better, something similar for PNG's
• Minifies the CSS and Javascript (also combines them where possible)