I've been meaning to start a new blog to record some notes on what I'm working on this year. I've got some ambitious plans so I might not have time to work on everything. Putting them here at least gives me a bit of a public todo list to work on.

Topic/post 1: Blog software. I wasted quite a bit of time looking for something good. I wanted:

• The interface to have a simple clean look (not cluttered)
• The code to be simple (no long list of pre-requistites)
• Hackable, something I could tinker with
• Written in PHP so I can quickly make changes, I looked at some python options
• Up-to-date with decent security updates etc
• RSS support so I can tap into updates with an IRC bot

I settled on Anchor CMS, got it up and running and then after a couple glitches I decided it was going to take too much time to modify for my needs (I plan to replace the comment system with something integrated into IRC as my first project) and it'd be easier to write something from scratch. So I did that. This blog then is the result of a couple hours work, but in that time I managed to get everything I needed:

• Simple interface, all posts are written in plain text and stored in a directory, no database needed
• All posts are written in Markdown, which suits me as I can type directly from the command line, where I'm usually to be found. I use this library to parse it: https://parsedown.org/ Which works well and is simple to use
• It's got all the usual things you'd expect; tags/categories, permalinks, human readable URLs and RSS feeds.

All in all, it's around 200 lines of code. I plan to upload it to github as one of my first projects there (I'll also self-host a git repo of it here of course).