Two years ago I said that I was going to blog every single day as my New Year's resolution. I managed 168 days and then nothing but silence. I am not really sure why I just stopped so suddenly, one possibility being that I used to use the commute home to do my writing, and my last entry was the day we moved out of San Francisco which altered my commute considerably. Whatever the reason, I have not written for the past 18 months or so and that is too bad. The reason I wanted to write every day was so that I could look back and see how I was feeling or what I was thinking about during certain periods of time without having to try and remember. The last 18 months have been decently crazy and it would have been really nice to see my thoughts during that time.

I also really wish I had access to those 168 posts but that is partially the story for this new set-up. I got an email from Webfaction, my hosting provider, telling me that the machine that my site was dying and thus they were going to migrate me to a new server. They were telling me because this meant that the IP address for my A record would need to be updated, but they said all of my data would be moved over without me having to do anything. As it turns out, when I finally got around to checking in on the new machine and changing my A record, I noticed that all of my files were gone. The directory structure was all there, but just no files. Weird. The code was backed up because I have it in a private Bitbucket repo, but what was not backed up was the CouchDB files where my blog posts were stored. So I sent an email to Webfaction asking about this and seeing if they could restore my data from their backups. Here is their response:

I am sorry but we were not able to recover your files from our backup system. Our system only keeps up to 10 days of backups and since it has been over 30 days there is no way to recover your files.

Regarding backups, we do make daily backups, but we do not guarantee their availability. Sometimes problems with the backup servers can prevent backups from being made successfully. Like all reputable web hosts, we do recommend to all our customers that they make their own backups independent of ours for any mission-critical data that they cannot afford to lose.

Well that is just clowny. I understand it I guess, but still it is ridiculous for a hosting provider to blow away all your files and then not be able to recover them from their backups. Yes I should have backed up my DB but I never got around to it so I have to pay the price for that.

I also tried to rely on the Wayback Machine and Google caches to try to restore my blog posts, but I only managed to get 3 out of the 168. I will be putting those up here soon and back dating them, they are all stupid, but what the hell. I actually wrote a tiny script to scrape the Wayback Machine which is how I got the 3, but it did not have archives for anything else.

All this led me to the decision to get off Webfaction and try something new. I also decided to try to incorporate the backup of my posts in a natural way. This led me to Github Pages and Jekyll. I considered going to Hakyll route which I read about here, but in the end I decided to take some of the ideas from blaenk's set-up and just mix it in with Jekyll. In particular, I have this blog set-up using Github pages with two different branches, master and source. The source branch has all of the actual code and content that Jekyll needs to create this site, whereas the master branch just has the generated output. I use a shell script to run Jekyll, perform a commit, and push the new content to the right branch. This was copied directly from the aforementioned site.

One interesting thing that he did which I wanted to copy was to leverage the fact that I am using git to have an automatic way of tracking the history of each post. On his site he used a single commit hash for every single post when he was using Jekyll because it requires you to regeneate everything every time. One nice think about Hakyll is that you only need to recompile what has changed, so it is easy to get a git commit hash for each post that only changes when the past actually changes. I wanted the best of both worlds so I modified his commit plugin to the following:

module Jekyll
  class Commit < Liquid::Tag
    MATCHER = /\A(\S+)\Z/
    def render(context)
      markup = @markup.strip
 
      page_file = "#{context.registers[:site].source}"
      file_path = "#{context.environments.first["page"]["path"]}"
      page_file += "/#{file_path}"
 
      sha = `git log -n 1 --pretty=format:%H -- #{page_file}`
      message = `git log -n 1 --pretty=format:%s -- #{page_file}`
 
      history_url = "<a href='https://github.com/rokob/rokob.github.com/commits/source/"
      history_url += file_path
      history_url += "'>History</a>"
 
      commit_url = "<span class='commit' title=\"#{message}\">"
      if not markup.empty?
        repo = markup.match(MATCHER)[1]
        commit_url += "<a href=\"https://github.com/#{repo}/commit/#{sha}\""
        commit_url += " title=\"#{message}\">#{sha[0...8]}</a>"
      else
        commit_url += "#{sha[0...8]}"
      end
      commit_url += "</span>"
 
      history_url + " -- " + commit_url
    end
  end
end
 
Liquid::Template.register_tag('commit', Jekyll::Commit)

The trick here is that I used the fact that git log can tell you the last commit when a particular file changed, which is exactly what I want. I just have to do some trickeration with the context variable that is passed in to get a file path for the current post, but after that it is pretty much the same as his original plugin.

Jekyll is a pretty nice tool, I can't imagine I would outgrow it for quite some time (where outgrow would mean generate too many pages to make the static site unwieldy or desparately need server side logic).

I am going to try to post on here more frequently and not try to force myself into writing everyday which will ultimately lead me to want to stop writing if I miss too many times. I already have some ideas for a few posts that will be meant to fill in the gaps of what I have been up to for the past 18 months, and then probably some even more boring stuff.