Yet Another Static HTML Blog

I'm a strict believer in learning by doing. It's how I learn best. In the spirit of learning, then, here's how I built the engine that powers this blog.

Right away I decided that there's no point in having a database to back this thing. The only useful thing that a database brings to the table is comments, and those are way more hassle than they're worth. Better to leave the comments at reddit or hacker news, where they already know how to deal with spam. Not having to worry about a database freed me up to worry about more important things, like how to put text on the screen. I'm most familiar with perl at the moment so I decided that the best way to build it would be a client-side script that generates some static html.

Current features:

• Absolutely no database
• Generates fully static html
• Automatically ships it to my server
• A really cheesy template system because I didn't want to learn Template::Toolkit just yet
• Archives for everything, and only show the last 10 entries on the front page
• Static pages (although currently there aren't any)
• Markdown parsing for entries

If you want to see the source for it (including all the entries), it's on github, but I warn you it's kind of lame. The template system in particular is not really what I want it to be yet. It's non-recursive, so publish.pl basically acts like the top-level template. I'll probably end up converting it to Template::Toolkit at some point.