If you want something done…

Well, it's finally happened. I've been getting along reasonably well with Nanoblogger for some time now, but a couple of things started to put me off.

Firstly, it is very slow indeed. I've only got a few posts up here, and I was having to wait for well over a minute for it to generate the blog. It might have been about three, but it was some time ago so don't quote me on that. Delving into the code, it looked like there were just a couple of hot spots, but they were getting very hot indeed.

Secondly, support for images in posts was, for me, rather awkward. The only way to include images in a post was to point to them with an absolute URL. For most people I can imagine this isn't a problem, but as it happens I like to view my blog from two places: via my main blog URL (where you're probably reading this from now), and from a secondary URL which gives me the option of previewing things before I release them. Obviously having the same link at different URLs isn't going to be easy, and although I'd patched round it using symlinks it wasn't pretty.

So, I decided that I wanted to keep the other key features of Nanoblogger — static pages, categories, no software dependencies other than bash, and a simple interface — whilst improving on the speed and flexibility. Needless to say, I've written the new engine from scratch, in bash, and it's both fast and portable. In fact, all the internal links are relative, and there's facility for including user content alongside the posts.

Atom, or possibly RSS 2.0, support will be along shortly, once I've had chance to digest the specification documents. In the meantime, hopefully this will mean that posts are slightly less infrequent.