Blog organization

So far, the blogging has been pretty light (8 posts). I’m still not happy with the organization. Most of the posts have been dumped in the computer directory, but if I actually start producing posts at a real clip, that won’t cut it. Most of my posts have not been ephemeral, they’ve documented things that I’ve done with my computer and programs I’ve written. Maybe they shouldn’t be part of a blog at all. I could recast them as static HTML pages and link to them from a home page or from the strip along the left margin of the blog. Blog entries on these things would then be short posts linking to the static pages and noting that they’ve been added or updated.

One thing that I’ve been pretty happy with is the Markdown plugin. It’s very good at turning lightly annotated plain text into HTML. It doesn’t add header and footer stuff, though, so if I want to convert my previous posts (written with Markdown) into static pages, I’ll have to add stuff at the tops and bottoms of the files. I’ve been wanting to learn Template Toolkit—maybe I can get it and Markdown to work together.

A blogroll would probably be good, too. Before the election, I was keeping track of several political blogs, using the Sage extension to Firefox. In my post-election depression, I deleted the political blogs and have vowed not to go back. Still, there are several sites I like to visit—need to install Blosxom’s blogroll plugin and figure out how to use it.

Update: Well, blogroll was pretty easy to figure out; now I just have to decide what to put into it. You’ll notice I’ve already reneged on my no politics vow, but Michael Bérubé is simply to good a writer to leave off.