It's archives all the way down! This is archive version of how I've run my blog over the years. The [[Colophon]] page covers "this" site, which is sort of a superset archive. The plan is I'll keep it active from now on in this Digital Notes Garden format.

July 2020 - current

The long(er) form content from the (original) blog.bmannconsulting.com has all been imported here.

I swapped that blog domain to [[Micro.blog]], and that's where I post photos and short content, and sort of more non tech bloggy content. Yes, there is a colophon there too.

May 2020

This blog is currently powered by Jekyll 4 hosted on Netlify. Netlify builds the site from a private git repo on Github.

I write short social posts on my phone via micropub. There are a variety of micropub clients you can browse on the IndieWeb site. The Indigenous native app for iOS works most reliably.

I also use Quill as a PWA on my phone. It also works great for all kinds of posts on desktop browsers too, including a first draft of long posts.

Long posts are most often finalized in VS Code and published via git.

Full size images are uploaded and stored in git. Various thumbnail sizes are generated on the fly via images.weserv.nl.

All the Best Recipes are where the long form food / cooking posts go, although I often share them via links and images posted as social posts here.

My @bmann Instagram I manually post to, either a variant of a social post I've already made here, or on the All the Best Recipes site. I cross post to Facebook from Instagram. My "rule" is no posting pictures to Instagram until they've been put somewhere permanent under my control. There is also an @allthebestrecipes Instagram, because really I need more places to post about food.

I'm now running paulrobertlloyd's IndieKit micropub server, and tweaking the display, feeds, and cross-posting to Micro.blog, which in turn posts to my @bmann Twitter account.

You can visit my micropub server to learn more about it. The post types that I have special display and treatment for are:

• Article -- long form posts in the Blog category by default
• Note -- the vast majority of short posts, often with images attached
• Bookmark -- so I can keep my bookmarks local
• Reply -- because I wanted to support it for leaving comments on other people's posts. This is also the RSVP type, which I've just added extra support for

The others work, I just haven't coded special treatment for them, so they likely don't display correctly.

Turned off jekyll-feed plugin to have Jekyll generate a custom RSS feed, because of the way I customize different kinds of micropub posts.

Previous Editions

Jekyll 3 on Netlify (Minimal Mistakes)

August 2018 - May 2020

I write on my phone or my Chromebook. On the Chromebook, Caret is a text / coding editor I use. The Netlify CMS lets me edit in a browser.

Short form links get sent to Twitter and/or shared on the Frontier Community¹. My Tumblr is rarely used. Tweets are archived at tweets.bmannconsulting.com.

tldr; the Netlify CMS doesn't support drafts on Gitlab, so put things back on Github.

Also moved to Michael Rose's Minimal Mistakes theme. Fighting with nokogiri on the Chromebook means no emoji. This meant posts have a slightly different default layout again: sed -i 's/layout: posts/layout: single/' *.md.

Netlify CMS is technically still installed, but rarely used.

In September 2018, I added a bunch of IndieWeb and Micropub interfaces and created social posts and bookmarks.

While OwnYouGram was working, I posted to my @bmann Instagram, and those posts would automatically be republished on this site.

Somewhere around this time frame, JSON feeds were added at micro.json, micro-bookmarks.json, and feed.json, and syndicated to Micro.blog, which I pay to re-publish on other networks. Briefly they went to LinkedIn, now mainly get sent over to Twitter.

In May of 2019, I added a Webmentions server.

Jekyll 3 on Netlify

June 2018 - August 2018

Most writing happened on Medium after November 2014 across various company publications, with the medium.bmannconsulting.com subdomain being the one where permanent posts end up. I should probably get around to getting a Medium download so I have them.

To upgrade, I did some yak shaving.

I created a new Gitlab borismann and imported from Bitbucket. I connected Netlify to it, but it failed to build. Digging in, I created a new branch 2018-reboot and deleted the Gemfile.lock, and edited Gemfile to use Jekyll 3, a newer Ruby, and nuked the rack stuff. bundle install got things going.

There is some nonsense with the file watching not working, so bundle exec jekyll serve --no-watch was needed.

The default post type is now "posts", which meant replacing across all files using sed: sed -i 's/layout post/layout: posts/' *.md.

layout: none used for the feed and sitemap is now layout: null.

Yay! It builds. Edit CNAME to point at Netlify. Enable HTTPS.

While I was at it, I also migrated the bmannconsulting main archive to Netlify as well.

Jekyll 2 on Heroku

August 2014 - November 2014

This blog is powered by Jekyll 2 hosted on Heroku. I'm using Andy Croll's RackJekyll instructions and buildpack so that the site is generated on the server.

I'm increasingly a fan of static site generators for content-focused publishing projects. I've written both a presentation on static site generators and an overview of node.js-based generators.

The design is GPLv2 licensed, So Simple by Michael Rose.

The comments are powered by Disqus. All comments are welcome, although I reserve the right to tell you to go post your thoughts in your own space somewhere.

Tweets to new stories are scheduled using Buffer and published on my @bmann account.

The domain bmannconsulting.com is over a decade old. NameCheap is the domain registrar and DNS host, and is still my recommendation for new domain registrations.

Posts are typically written in Markdown with Byword on a Macbook Air or iPad Mini. Code for the site is edited with Atom.

My writing here tends to be long form (1000+ words) original pieces, aside from aggregation-plus-commentary of embedded Storify content. For example, this piece on the Microsoft Surface launch. The content is also rarely personal, mainly focusing on tech-related subjects.

Short form link blog content is at links.bmannconsulting.com, and is powered by Postachio, an Evernote-powered blogging platform. I wrote about link blogging with Postachio.

HarpJS on Harp Platform

April 2013 - August 2014

This blog is running on the Harp Platform, a lightweight web server with pre-processing built in, with files uploaded via my own Dropbox account. Also check out the HarpJS open source project.

The design is a CC-BY licensed HTML5 template called Striped, which uses the skel.js front end framework to make the site responsive.

Tweets to new stories are hand-posted using Tweetbot, although the RSS feed is also syndicated using dlvr.it to various places, including @horse_eboris.

Code for the site is edited with Sublime Text.

Octopress on Heroku

April 2012 - August 2013

I archived my main site to Octopress-generated flat files on Amazon S3, and moved this site to Octopress on Heroku. I wrote up the details of the migration from Drupal 6 to Octopress and Amazon S3.

For both sites, the entire source was / is in my own Dropbox account, so that I could create drafts and edits on any machine. This site was also in a private git repo on Bitbucket. I still needed to have the entire Ruby / Octopress build chain available on some machine to create new entries.

Posterous

January 2010 - April 2012

I split off my blog into it's own subdomain. I selected Posterous because I liked built-in comments, and in general it felt more suited to long form writing than Tumblr did. Being able to cross-post back to my main Drupal site so that I would have a copy of the content was also great.

Drupal (various versions 3.x - 6.x)

November 2002 - April 2012

For the last period, the site was hosted on Omega8, which specializes in managed Drupal hosting on top of the Aegir mass hosting system. The actual database / content stretched back many versions of Drupal, through a variety of content re-organization and hosting changes.

Comments from this period are currently offline.

HTML, Pmachine, & Early Experiments

December 2001 - 2003

Bits and pieces of static HTML and various PHP scripts, including Pmachine as a personal blog that ran concurrrently with installs of PHPNuke and later my Drupal site.