And not enough time writing posts. I still spend plenty of time messing around with code though and as such have been working on a couple of projects. One of which being the side project I mentioned in my previous post and the other being related to me finally getting around to overhauling this site.

Getting my feet wet in Python

I’ve been on Linux for a while now and one thing I had wanted since was a PF or DA for Linux customization. It was always a hassle trying to keep up with and search through dozens of threads and numerous repos and so the goal was to create a place that facilitated the sharing and discovery of Linux config files.

Out of that came DotShare and my first real project in Python. Using pip, virtualenv, and coding DotShare on Flask, were all much more enjoyable experiences than the ones I had with their Ruby counterparts, gems, RVM, and Rails. I’d have to say I’m quite the fan and look forward to playing around with Python some more in the future.

Another static site generator you say

While managing the temporary site I had up on GitHub pages, I ran into a lot of annoyances with jekyll (the generator that powers GitHub pages), most of which being with Liquid (the template engine jekyll uses).

My problem with most template engines is how polarizing they are about the concepts supporting their existence. They make no distinction between business and presentation logic and are either logic-less or see the situation as the more logic the better.

With Liquid, I was constantly running into situations where it just wouldn’t do what I needed. This was often partially due to the way jekyll was handing me data. Such things as wanting a list of tags ordered by usage or posts being organized by year and month should not be monumental tasks to accomplish.

For the same reason most wheels get reinvented, that being they don’t do what you want how you want them to, I created mynt.

Until next time

With the site now setup in a manner I’m happier with, I’m hoping to up my rate of 2 posts a year to something a bit more lively. I’m still working on the last few touches on mynt and have some refactoring to do, but that should be done pretty soon and so that’ll be 3 posts for the year at the least!