amdavidson

about

about me

My name is Andrew Davidson and you've reached my personal slice of the web. This site has been around in various forms since February of 2005 and allows me to post things that to share with the world.

You can also find me elsewhere on the web. Pinboard, Facebook, and Twitter are probably the sites I update the most frequently.

My email address is andrew@amdavidson.com and is probably the most reliable way to contact me.

about the site

This blog has been run on most every blogging platform out there. It started statically and manually generated. Soon afterward I realized that it would be very difficult to manage a manually coded site and switched to a PHP and MySQL based site. From there it was a complicated sojourn to a Rails based site, a split into andr3w.net and Mephisto, then Wordpress, Posterous, Tumblr, toto, a custom Sinatra based site, and now I've settled on a custom engine that I've named crunch.

about crunch

Fed up with all the previous solutions and the load placed on my server, I wrote crunch. Crunch uses structured folders to generate a static site that can be served quickly and easily by nginx on my relatively modest VPS from prgmr.

It's heavily CLI based and can be tightly integrated with a server to rebuild on a periodic basis with cron, due to inputs from an email LDA, or manually.

It contains most of the features of a more mature blogging engine. It has markdown support, it will process posts and top level pages, it will combine and (gently) minify javascript and CSS, it will process folders of images into a gallery, it has a built in local development server with simple, but dynamic rebuilding.

Right now it's not very flexible: the templating is inflexible and built into the script. That's on the agenda, but hasn't yet been accomplished.

If that hasn't scared you away fork it on github and adapt it to your needs.