As of this posting, my blog has moved to an ikiwiki instance on my own server. I made this change for several reasons, with the primary ones being that
- I can edit my posts offline in any editor I want. Since I often work offline, this is a huge advantage for me.
- I can use revision control to manage the site.
- The data that is valuable to me (i.e., my posts) is under my control and in a format that is easy to extract.
- ikiwiki is also a nice tool for managing a Web site, so I can kill two birds with one stone (once I actually write a Web site, that is).
Obviously some of those could be acheived using blogspot, with a sufficiently complicated workflow, but ikiwiki makes this painless and natural.
The major downsides seem to be:
- ikiwiki doesn't support blog comments. For the time being, please email me with any comments on my blog posts and I'll post them myself. My email address is Daniel_Burrows@alumni.brown.edu.
- The Emacs Markdown mode has some annoying flaws, such as not understanding Markdown lists.
I haven't set gitweb up yet, so there are no history links available. Once I feel confident that I understand the security implications of using gitweb, I'll see how to enable it.