It’s been a while since I updated here. As usual I should say…

I’ve never liked writing things inside web interfaces. As I use the VIM editor everyday to write code, e-mails, notes, it seemed inappropriate not keep writing in it when it came to these short rants. For a while, I would keep notes on disk, before publishing them. But the truth is I’d never push those online, bored by the login window, and the lipsticked textarea. Time for a change!

I also decided to drop the “wtf.cyprio.net” sub-domain, to store all the stuff on the main “cyprio.net” domain. This means I need to care for only one web site, and I naïvely hope that it’ll help me update more.

Moving the site to Hakyll

I had been wanting to try hakyll for quite some time, and extracting my previous posts from Habari’s DB to plain markdown files on disk proved simple enough (with a few lines of Ruby magic).

Another tool I’m using daily is Git, so yes all these files are obviously pushed to a git repository which I host privately. While this is a public website, and I’d rather push it to my public Github account, I still have a few things to iron out before doing so…

Psst, that link’s broken…

For instance, there are quite a few media files lingering out there. I pushed none of those to git, and don’t intend to: storing binary blobs in git can make it slowish, but mainly I think it’s bad style. As I’d rather release than wait everything to be perfectly perfect, I’m still pushing this version live today.

It contains some broken pictures, broken links too, but I’m working on fixing these.

Just use git-annex

I’d like to use git-annex to (re-)publish the missing images, and other static files that are no longer available at the moment. This may involve little bits of hacking from my part, and some symlinks here and there.

I like that git-annex (git-annex assistant actually) allows you to synchronize folders (much like Dropbox would) transparently. But its strength is its flexibility when it comes to what you want to store, and where you want it saved. Yes, it can encrypt your stuff if you want…

Git-annex allows you to store the metadata of the repository files, while their content is backup-ed elsewhere. This is great when you want a few files from your photo or music collection locally, but don’t want to download everything. As this works both ways, it’s a nice tool to share files publicly too.