I think I’ve finally got this working properly, but who knows how much longer it will stay online so I’d better write this quickly.
I’d been looking for a way to better perform searches for this blog within the config. That is to say, for certain routes, I’d like posts with certain characteristics to appear. The criteria for the posts are a search, and are associated to the route configuration.
I had mentioned a while back that I had written a new application to serve this blog, written in Elixir, and called it “Eldir”. No sooner had I done that than I started goofing around with Go, and wrote a brand new application for serving this blog, which I’m calling “Sn”, for “Tin”.
Sn is built with the same concept in mind as with Eldir – to take as input a directory of markdown files (usually part of a local git checkout) and a config file, and serve a dynamic, templatized site from them. The constraints I set for myself are basically the same, where I’d like to load all of the data into memory, and then never touch disk unless serving a static file directly.
I recently asked via Twitter whether anyone still followed bloggers that did not have topical blogs. Do you follow a blogger that diarizes, rather than trying to sell you something, either directly or via ads? The overwhelming majority confirmed my suspicion that blogging is pretty well dead as an art. If you're blogging these days, you're possibly screaming into the maelstrom, unheard by anyone, being drowned out by the published content that built to suit.
One thing I hear a lot is that social media has taken the place that blogging used to fill. If you had a desire to write something online in 2005, you published a blog. These days, you're writing on Facebook or posting a photo on Instagram. These venues, although they are not owned by the publisher, make sharing this content with peers easier. It is only possible to receive accolades of disembodied thumb-raised-fists via these venues. Of course their ubiquity and ease make them attractive even to the non-technical. Thereby blogging takes a hit.