I might as well lay out what exactly this blog is running. It’s actually just ordinary lighttpd behind cloudflare, with jekyll handling content generation. I also ripped off Google’s own SWF-based mp3 player for streaming mp3’s. I’ve added a decent favicon and added @font-face to the jekyll theme I grabbed. I’m really enjoying the Amazon EC2 + Cloudflare + Jekyll combination. I even have jekyll installed on the EC2 instance serving these pages up, so content generation is as dynamic as I’d like it to be without having to worry about transferring many (if any) files. I enjoy this setup, and I can post blog entries from pretty much anywhere, given my current SSH setup. I can even blog from my phone if I really wanted to. Jekyll kicks ass. Amazon does as well. Blogging has never been so easy.

One of the most useful little tools for information parsing that I’ve used has to be awk. Specifically, awk will allow you to pipe text through it and use the printf() function to format text as you require it to be formatted. It also has a basic scripting language that lends further functionality, making it an ubiquitous tool in the POSIX arsenal. Need to format a list of US States for a Maruku table? Not a problem. Copy / Paste it into a text file and pipe it through this:

I’ve completely fallen in love with Jekyll as a blogging platform. I might create a few more websites or write my own Jekyll template, depending on free time and my mood in the next two weeks. If I’m able to find employment that gives me a moment’s peace, I’ll definitely forge forward with the awesomeness that is a Jekyll tutorial, because I think everyone should get to know this stuff. It’s fun, flexible, and worth investing a little time to research. I’ll drop a link to it in another post some time today.