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I love these hands-on write-ups! This one is particularly well written and thoughtful. It makes me feel I could follow along and do it myself. For me, the post

by lysium 5y ago

I love these hands-on write-ups! This one is particularly well written and thoughtful. It makes me feel I could follow along and do it myself. For me, the posts underlines the argument that you’ll feel better if you stick to the tools or languages you know. The $RET$ hack smells weird. Can you join the lines before flushing it down the markdown renderer?

eecc 5y ago
Very nice indeed. I bet it wasn’t the intention of the author, but the intro sounded a bit critical of Octopress and of how it fell behind, and so on. Perhaps I woke up in the wrong mood, but I’d have praised the authors and community of the tool, it’s open-source, was built with generosity out of one’s own free time. That’s quite a capital! So, we all know stuff gets abandoned, people do move on, perhaps they could handle handovers or sunsetting better, but let’s be first of all grateful.
- capableweb 5y ago
  I'd agree with you, but the passage is really not passing any blame and is being factual, not exaggerated or flaming the authors in any way. I think it's a pretty fair observation even if critical. Doesn't mean the work so far wasn't appreciated. For posterity, here is the passage: > I started using Octopress back then and was still using it until today. In recent years I became frustrated with it since on every new system I had to install a version of Ruby that happened to work with Octopress, which wasn't always the case. When it did work, I started getting deprecation warnings from Ruby while compiling this blog. On top of this, Octopress seemed no longer maintained. The website says "Octopress 3.0 is Coming" but this announcement was from 2015 and the website hasn't been updated ever since. It felt like time to move on.
- Borkdude 5y ago
  Thanks for the feedback. I added the following: Octopress worked great for my blogging purposes and I'm grateful that it existed. However, in recent years I became frustrated with the experience of using it, which is probably due to a lack of my familiarity with the Ruby ecosystem.
  - ewalk153 5y ago
    This is a lovely, honest sentiment. Thanks for sharing (here and on your blog).
Borkdude 5y ago
> The $RET$ hack smells weird. Can you join the lines before flushing it down the markdown renderer? Unfortunately this didn't work since it would also join lines in code snippets that contained []'s. This is a basic hack that prevented me from writing a more sophisticated markdown parser.
- cxr 5y ago
  The problem with things like the $RET$ hack is that now you have a forbidden magic character sequence. Although this isn't the worst thing in the world, it doesn't look like you're doing basic validation on your input to make sure that that sequence doesn't already appear organically, which is the consequence of doing things this way. Considering you now have at least one input file where this sequence does appear organically (i.e. this blog post), I'm also curious how your setup is handling this correctly instead of mangling the content. What am I missing?
  - Borkdude 5y ago
    Since this is my personal script, I'll take the trade-off of not being able to use $RET$. If I would have written a framework or library, I would have solved it more at the root level, but that wasn't a cost I was ready to pay at this stage. The real sequence is $$RET$$ so what you see in the blog post is a variant of this, just to explain the idea.
    - Borkdude 5y ago
      I added a clarification of this in the blog post.

by lysium 5y ago

eecc 5y ago

Very nice indeed. I bet it wasn’t the intention of the author, but the intro sounded a bit critical of Octopress and of how it fell behind, and so on. Perhaps I woke up in the wrong mood, but I’d have praised the authors and community of the tool, it’s open-source, was built with generosity out of one’s own free time. That’s quite a capital! So, we all know stuff gets abandoned, people do move on, perhaps they could handle handovers or sunsetting better, but let’s be first of all grateful.

capableweb 5y ago
I'd agree with you, but the passage is really not passing any blame and is being factual, not exaggerated or flaming the authors in any way. I think it's a pretty fair observation even if critical. Doesn't mean the work so far wasn't appreciated. For posterity, here is the passage: > I started using Octopress back then and was still using it until today. In recent years I became frustrated with it since on every new system I had to install a version of Ruby that happened to work with Octopress, which wasn't always the case. When it did work, I started getting deprecation warnings from Ruby while compiling this blog. On top of this, Octopress seemed no longer maintained. The website says "Octopress 3.0 is Coming" but this announcement was from 2015 and the website hasn't been updated ever since. It felt like time to move on.
Borkdude 5y ago
Thanks for the feedback. I added the following: Octopress worked great for my blogging purposes and I'm grateful that it existed. However, in recent years I became frustrated with the experience of using it, which is probably due to a lack of my familiarity with the Ruby ecosystem.
- ewalk153 5y ago
  This is a lovely, honest sentiment. Thanks for sharing (here and on your blog).

Borkdude 5y ago

> The $RET$ hack smells weird. Can you join the lines before flushing it down the markdown renderer? Unfortunately this didn't work since it would also join lines in code snippets that contained []'s. This is a basic hack that prevented me from writing a more sophisticated markdown parser.

cxr 5y ago
The problem with things like the $RET$ hack is that now you have a forbidden magic character sequence. Although this isn't the worst thing in the world, it doesn't look like you're doing basic validation on your input to make sure that that sequence doesn't already appear organically, which is the consequence of doing things this way. Considering you now have at least one input file where this sequence does appear organically (i.e. this blog post), I'm also curious how your setup is handling this correctly instead of mangling the content. What am I missing?
- Borkdude 5y ago
  Since this is my personal script, I'll take the trade-off of not being able to use $RET$. If I would have written a framework or library, I would have solved it more at the root level, but that wasn't a cost I was ready to pay at this stage. The real sequence is $$RET$$ so what you see in the blog post is a variant of this, just to explain the idea.
  - Borkdude 5y ago
    I added a clarification of this in the blog post.