dystill moved to Jekyll and Bootstrap

If you have done and OS X/macOS development, especially any that predated the Mac App Store, you are probably aware of Sparkle. Even if you haven’t done any development, you have probably used Sparkle because it was basically the de facto method of providing update functionality in Mac Apps, and even to this day is still widely used on many apps distributed outside the official App Store. Updates are distributed to applications by means of an “appcast”, an extension of the RSS specification containing information about updates. RSS itself is based on XML, which means you can build them just like you would build any other published document. The problem comes when you start having a lot of updates in an appcast. Maintaining a large file can become difficult. But fortunately, using Jekyll collections, we can generate a single appcast using multiple files that are much easier to maintain. And, as an added bonus, we can use that same data to generate a download and changelog page from the same data.

So you may notice that robpeck.com now has an entirely new look. It’s not just a new look, but a ground-up re-architecture of my blog.

Twelve years ago I wrote a little program called Dystill. It is a filtering mail delivery agent that could sort and filter email based on rules stored in a MySQL database. At the time I wrote it, I was transitioning away from using Gmail to running my own mail server, and I needed a way to filter my incoming mail into folders (akin to Gmails labels and automatic filtering) with the ability to quickly add rules without having to manually edit files. And for twelve years, that little program has just run reliably in the background with very few updates. The last time I changed it was 2012. In the meantime, the world has moved on and Python 2 (which it was written in) is no longer supported. And truthfully it was the last piece of Python 2 code in my whole setup. But I had been punting on updating it because it worked.