After years of not updating this blog I've sat down to determine why I find it difficult.

I have six drafts waiting, but rather than publish them I keep editing and editing. I think it's because many do not concern point in time events, but are informational; and that information either keeps changing or I keep learning so want to improve the post. With no firm deadline and likely no one but myself reading them, there is no reason to publish, so I put it off until I achieve some hypothetical perfection that will never come.

Instead of a blog, I need a knowledge base. I already maintain a private one; if I can find a way to also manage a public one I think I can keep things up to date (a KB by definition is always changing), and actually publish content.

I'm going to experiment keeping a "public" and a private KB and see how the process goes; if I can do this without confusing myself I'll look at making some changes here. Static site generators I've looked at in the past all seem either too heavyweight or too opinionated, so I'll most likely be looking at writing a stylesheet and using pandoc to convert markdown to HTML.

Possible problems/concerns:

• I'll need a search function. I dislike sites that outsource local search to a search engine, so will need an indexing system (either by tags or fulltext). That's not too difficult, but is work to do.
• Under the assumption that somebody does/will want to use RSS, I'll need an RSS feed to list updates; likely just one feed to list pages that have changed with brief descriptions of those changes to avoid filling newsreaders with content that has mostly been read before. I should be able to use a git hook and git commit messages to automate this process.

So changes may be coming to the format of this site; at the rate I move it may be a couple of years though...