Unless you’re a web publishing nerd, you should probably stop reading here.

Back in college I wrote an awful lot - one of the advantages of a liberal arts education - but since then I’ve fallen woefully out of practice. I’m pretty sure at least part of the problem is the unpleasant experience that is composing thoughts in WordPress, and my previous attempts to hack together an emacs2WordPress workflow just haven’t panned out.

I’m happy to report, then, that I’m preliminarily very excited about Jekyll, a “blog aware static content generator” written by one of the GitHub guys. Static content generation is certainly nothing new, but the implementation is slick, and some simple Rakefile hacks and git orchestration makes the whole thing really smooth.

So now, writing moves from snippets collected in org files, OmniFocus notes and emacs buffers to Markdown formatted files in my Jekyll tree, and finally gets pushed via Git to a repository on my server, where a post-receive hook runs runs Jekyll. Jekyll works its magic and dumps the results into a directory served by httpd, and that’s what you see. This seems to work pretty well, and lets me keep my text editing where I like it, in emacs. Some handy Jekyll editing functions from Alex Payne metajack help tie things together.

I originally wanted to take advantage of GitHub’s free hosting of Jekyll sites, but ended up wanting a bit more flexibility than they currently provide, mainly around feed generation and serving.

To celebrate the occasion, and just in time for the start of the work year, I’ve also started publishing at a different URL. The luxury of an unusual name keeps me at the top of ”g travis vachon”, so I don’t feel bad about going with something a little more fanciful. combinate is nice and succinct and captures a lot of what I like in the world and technology in particular and, most importantly, wasn’t taken.

So, Happy New Year, and here’s to writing more.