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Rejourn

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The story is old, it was exactly 3 years ago when last time I switched the engine under my blog. That time I switched from my custom php/mysql blog to b2evolution, and I hoped that using that engine it’ll require less time to manage it. Actually this wasn’t true:

  • When the php-5.3 upgrade came, I had to manually fix stuff.

  • I got a lot of spam, even if the captcha provided by the ready-to-use b2evo plugin was enabled.

  • The last thing: It turned out that it created the SQL schema in latin2, so utf8 comments had problems.

At that point I had enough trouble to think about migrating away from b2evo. And then I found rejourn, which is quite close to what I think is ideal to me. I just changed it a bit:

  • Added asciidoc support next to markdown.

  • Added RSS support, as my blog is part of the Frugalware and the LibreOffice planet, and I didn’t want to lose those readers.

  • Added support for tags, so that I can have a feed with a given tag only (to avoid OT posts on planets).

Before you ask: yes, I plan to submit back these feature to rejourn, if Ram accepts them. ;)

And finally, some more benefits:

  • the whole blog is now static HTML, generated by a single Makefile (so it’s faster + the server load is lower)

  • I can blog while I’m offline then later just git push the result.

  • I no longer have to use WYSIWYG editors or write HTML manually, I can use asciidoc. :)

Update: I forgot to mention:

  • I put up a simple b2evo → rejourn conversion script.

  • I just discovered that when I get email about new comments, I can reply via email as well - that’s really cool! :)

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