I've been munging my blog some more. Right now it's only running under WSGI, and I've turned the tags and the tag cloud back on. There was some odd behavior earlier, so it may still be somewhat broken.

I'm fiddling with a WSGI instance of PyBlosxom. It seems faster than the CGI version.

I've changed the blog to using pyBlosxom's static rendering. Unfortunately, this meant getting rid of tags and the tag cloud. Perhaps I'll be able to add them back in later. Oh well.

I suppose in part it is because I simply reached the maximum level of frustration with my previous set of tools that I could stand, and have had to start looking at alternatives. (Unfortunately, this happened with a number of things all at once, so I'm looking for replacements for several of the tools I use constantly.)

In part it is simply because I need more practice writing. At one point in my life I did a lot of writing, and fairly easily. Of late, it's been harder and has happened much less. I need to get back into practice.

I'm slowly figuring out more about pyBlosxom, and will eventually end up with a reasonable set of blog tools. This evening I've been figuring out more about statically rendering my blog, which ought to overcome the noticable lags when accessing my blog. I haven't switched the actual blog over to static rendering yet, but I'm getting closer. So far the incremental part doesn't seem to be working.

I considered moving to awb, an AsciiDoc-based Website Builder, but I still find the reStructuredText markup slightly nicer. If only there was a good reStructuredText to DocBook path I'd have no qualms at all.

I've been using the DocBook Website customization to build my website since the beginning.

First I used the DSSSL stylesheets to built it. They built the website as a single SGML (and later XML) document from multiple input files included into a main organizing file that produced multiple HTML output files, checking all the cross references and building a site map. Unfortunately, this method stopped working in my environment for some reason, and I never had time to figure out why.

I thought I'd see how the XSL stylesheets the DocBook Website customization worked. The architecture for the Website customization changed between the two: now the website was multiple documents, each built from an XML input file and producing an HTML output file, and using the DocBook XSL stylesheet olink cross-document linking for links between the different pages. This necessitated changing all the source files, but even more unfortunately the processing of cross document links consumed so much memory that rebuilding the site took forever, and eventually got to the point where it used more memory than was usually available on my server. (Admittedly, my setup was atypical for DocBook, and perhaps even pathological.)

In disgust, I let my site lie fallow, waiting for some better solution to present itself. Alas, nothing was immediately forthcoming. I really like DocBook for markup, and the “correct” solution would probably be to take Norm Walsh's route and custom-build some DocBook to website software, but frankly I haven't had the time or energy to do that, especially since, if I follow Norm's example, I'd have to take the time to figure out RDF and so forth.

Eventually I decided that I'd try something minimal: adding a new blog using pyBloxsom, which seemed simple enough to be comprehendable. It supported reStructuredText, one of the nicer plaintext markup systems, which was a definite bonus [1]. After fiddling around about I got enough for a reasonably comfortable minimalist blog. So, give it a look-see.

I've been increasing dissatisfied with the complex of software I use to create my web pages. Until I replace the whole thing with something better I'm going to be doing things on this new blog.

This, by the way, is the actual first post. Anything that is earlier is backdated to the date it actually happened, and will be (eventually) marked with the “timewarp” tag, and have a link to this post.