[susam]

I began blogging in the early 2000s when blogging on blogspot.com, wordpress.com, livejournal.com, etc. was quite popular. While they were pretty good for quickly writing and publishing content using their built-in layout templates, I also cared about customising the HTML templates to suit my taste. To my disappointment, I found working with their HTML templates clumsy. For example, with blogspot.com, I would spend a few hours customising the template to my needs and then a few months later they would make an update to the website, such as adding a few new elements or removing some, which would then end up rendering my template in a slightly different way that I might not have anticipated.

I have since moved away from blogging platforms. I have my own little Common Lisp program and my own HTML templates, all handwritten from scratch, and I am very happy with the results. The biggest benefit of this approach I find is that the layout does not change or break every few months/years and I can focus completely on writing content.

[emadda]

Do you write your content directly in Lisp/HTML?

[susam]

I write the content in HTML. I know many like to write it directly in Lisp where Lisp macros that correspond to HTML tags do the work of generating the HTML. However, I began blogging long before I learnt Lisp, so I had a lot of content written in plain HTML, so I stuck with HTML for the content.