Gulping down websites

For the last few years, I've been using a Jekyll-based website. I started with a mostly stock setup, but it wasn't long before I was supplementing the results with Perl, Python, and a fairly complicated Makefile. This worked (and sucked out many hours out of my life) and I was pretty happy.

As I've been posting repeatedly, the entire process has been getting slower and slower. The Jekyll version was taking ten to fifteen minute, which was frustrating when I'm trying to write a post (no preview).

I also started doing serials. The weekly nature of posting could really use some scheduling. That way if I have a few hours to work ahead of time, I could write up the posts and get them queued up. Yes, I'm lazy but I also know that I've had more than a few postings minutes why of midnight.

This year, I'm also planning on doing Lexember, a conlang-a-day challenge for December. This could really use scheduled posts.

Over the last week, I've created a Gulp-based system that creates the entire website. This will make it easier to work with Gitlab's CI service, which I trigger with a cron job. It also runs a lot faster.

The really hard part is to migrate the Fedran site over to this system because I have a lot of logic, but that is an adventure for another year.

Eventually, I'll actually write up the twenty Gulp plugins I've created to make this. Mainly, I just wanted to test the CI and scheduled posts.

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