2020 Blog Update

So it's been a while.

After my last system upgrade, this blog languished on my old hard drive for a while, but I recently discovered an update I needed to make, and in order to get there, I needed to get this off the old hard drive, hook it up, and so on. So here we are.

And, in so doing, I discovered this blog was running Middleman 3 on Ruby 2.1.2, and time has been marching on in the meantime. I was already working towards porting another site to a new SSG, but I thought I might as well update the technology for this site in the process.

I'm not feeling ambitious, so I stuck with Middleman and Ruby, but I at least wanted a version of Ruby that was still getting updates, and a compatible version of Middleman, and so forth. As with any aging technology product, updating one thing led to another, and so I found myself dealing with Bundler 1 -> 2, Middleman 3 -> 4, Ruby 2.7.1, then discovering that Middleman is ... not abandoned, but clearly not being developed with the same pace and vibrancy of when I last saw it.

Middleman 4 and Ruby 2.7 aren't 100% happy with one another at this point, and while downgrading to Ruby 2.6.6 brought some new warnings, it did at least get me to a workable state. So here it will sit for a while. Once I finish setting up the other site and possibly getting more exposure to Hugo or Gatsby or 11ty, I'll decide what the next steps are. Porting this to another SSG might not be super-fun, but we'll see where I end up.

In the meantime, maybe now that I'm up to date, I'll also update this blog now and again.