New design

A few days ago, I decided to give my blog a new look. Consequently, I wanted to upgrade nanoblogger from version 3.3 to at least 3.4. or even 3.5. Thinking about the upgrade procedure however, gave me a headache - there are just too many small fixes and workarounds I tinkered into nanoblogger's source code. After I spent some time searching for alternatives, I eventually ended up with Tinkerer, a Python-based static blog compiler. Apart from being actively developed, Tinkerer has two advantages over nanoblogger I especially want to emphasize.

First of all, Tinkerer is fast. Completely rebuilding my blog takes just about 2 seconds - nanoblogger needs over 3 minutes for the same task. Secondly, Tinkerer offers source code highlighting for many programming and markup languages by using Pygments.

Additionally, transferring the old blog postings from nanoblogger was easier than expected. I wrote a small shell script that converts the *.txt files inside nanoblogger's data directory into a format known by Tinkerer. Of course, this just automates some steps of the process and can't spare you the work of manually fixing errors and warnings Tinkerer might report. Still, it saved me a lot of work.

On the downside, I already stumbled on some bugs - if you plan to use Tinkerer for your own blog, this might save you a lot of trouble, if you're repeatedly getting unexplainable UnicodeErrors.