The Monkinetic Weblog

Guess it's time to revisit the blog engine here. I wrote Goldfrog a few years ago and it's been chugging along on this Digital Ocean instance fairly well, but at the time I had in mind a two-way sync between gitlab, where I maintain a separate repository of my archived content, and the filesystem/db in Goldfrog.

It worked, sort of, for a while, but the deployment on DO is NOT simple to remember, uses Ansible and code from 2 different git repos to set up or update the server, and was just 3 times more clever than it should have been.

I also implemented a flexible/configurable POSSE feature that is supposed to send updates to my mastodon account but ... isn't right now? And the logging setup on the site is abysmal.

I still like parts of my system. If I did it again, I'd still want:

• My custom posting UI that works like the ancient Radio Userland sites did: post form at the top of the home page list of posts:

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

And my version in Goldfrog:

(SORRY, LOST IMAGE)

• A small web app - not a static site generator
• Content stored ultimately as markdown files so they can be stored in git or similar
• Content indexed in sqlite for searching. serving various archive pages (tags, etc)

UPDATE: As long as I'm dreaming, I wish it was easier to run a small web app like this off a container. I probably could with Digital Ocean's app platform, I haven't looked into it lately, and I'd still have to solve the "index in a sqlite db file" problem.