Subject:	New blog
From:		.jh
Date:		2017-11-11T01:53:00Z
Tags:		about 2017 blog

I started this blog back in 2009 when I helped port blogsum to FreeBSD
as that's what my webserver was running at the time. While blogsum was
purposebuilt to run on OpenBSD's apache 1.3 with mod\_perl it ran fine
on FreeBSD using apache2 as well. At some point my webserver was
migrated to OpenBSD and there it's stayed. Over the years OpenBSD
mothballed their custom apache 1.3 in favour first of nginx and then
their own httpd; around the time the first change was percolating up I
migrated all my exising websites to nginx, the exception was the blog
as nginx didn't support mod\_perl. So it alone stayed on apache, first
1.3 and the when OpenBSD stopped packaging that it moved to 2.x. After
a recent upgrade it just wouldn't start, apache couldn't load
mod\_perl throwing an exception and couldn't start.

---

[afresh1@](https://twitter.com/afresh1) graciously hacked up a [Plack
app](https://gist.github.com/afresh1/bc9318482a9fdba74b99823b4c120be3)
for blogsum and like that I was rid of mod\_perl and blogsum was
running again. However I had for a long time been contemplating moving
to something else, something with fewer dependencies and which could
run in either nginx or OpenBSD's
[httpd(8)](http://man.openbsd.org/httpd). I had looked at
[sblg](https://kristaps.bsd.lv/sblg/) but I didn't really want to
write XML nor am I good enough at CSS to figure out how to get it to
look enough like my existing blog, so it fell to the wayside.

One day I ran across
[reyk](https://reykfloeter.com/posts/blog-about-my-blog)'s post about
moving to sblg and there I had 95% of all the scaffolding I needed to
get my blog converted. Using that and then hacking up the CSS wasn't
too hard (how hard is an all black theme anyway?). There were a few
stumbles, he has all his posts in a single directory which offends my
sense of order as I liked to have them grouped by at least year. A few
hours of hacking the Makefile and templates and that was mostly fixed.
Then came the big one, I have tags which are not single words, now
sblg explicitly allows for this but the Makefile could not handle it.
In the end it was really just three changes but as someone unfamiliar
with Makefiles and whose shellscripting skills are on the rudimentary
side it took way longer than expected. I'm also fairly certain my
solutions are inefficient, they work but they could probably be vastly
superior.

Lastly I had to add some rewrites to nginx to deal with the changed
uri, on the old blog it contained the month as well as year, this was
dropped as I don't post enough to warrant the additional directories.
The old uri could also contain colons, which now have to be dropped.
The rewrite proved quite simple, which is always nice.

Other than squeezing some efficiency out of my Makefile, my other
remaining issue is figuring out if there is a way to include the
bandcamp links in the markdown version which each post starts as. As I
read it, this doesn't seem possible, but perhaps there is some way
around it. For now the workaround is to insert them later in the xml
file directly. Ugly and hackish but it works.