Tools

Perfidy is a Drupal 11 site. Drupal is an open source content management system, one that I use in my professional life. Once upon a time, I would have recommended WordPress for most users looking for an easy to use, easy to stand up tool to create a simple website¹I myself did exactly that when I created the Veil War site to host my novel. This is no longer the case, as feature creep has led to increasing complexity and user-hostility. Add in the shenanigans of its founder, and at this point I'd almost recommend learning to code and writing your own CMS over using WordPress.

Perfidy is hosted on Bluehost, a reputable and for the most part easy to use hosting platform. They are reliable and I recommend them unreservedly. The domain is hosted on Namecheap which is indeed cheap, and for names. I recommend them even more unreservedly.

Before Perfidy even got to the big internet, it spent a lot of time in a local environment on my laptop. There are lots of ways you can set up a development environment. My favorite, and one I insisted that my company adopt, is ddev. All praise to ddev for being a rock-solid and easy to use utility that abstracts away absolutely everything I hated coping with. Like Docker containers.

There are hundreds of options for code editors and integrated development environments. I've tried most of them. But quite a while ago I adopted Atom which was developed by GitHub. When GitHub got acquired by MicroSoft, my favorite software company²not my favorite software company, MicroSoft deprecated Atom in favor of MS tools like Visual Studio. Thankfully a group of devoted, nearly saint-like individuals rescued Atom and it was re-born as Pulsar. It's a highly customizable and platform-agnostic editor that for me is just comfortable. Some day I'll be forced to change, but I won't like it. Its one major flaw (for me) is that there is not nor will there ever be an iOS version.

Like you'd expect, I use Pulsar for coding and development. It's great for that. What you might not expect is that I also use it for all my writing. I've written novels and role-playing games in Pulsar, and back them up like I would any software project using GitHub. Once you realize that a word processor is a typewriter emulator - and that a writing project is not meant to be printed out like a memo or letter - then using a text editor makes perfect sense. Only when it's written do I consider using another app to produce a finished or printable version. If I produce blog posts for this latest incarnation of Perfidy, they'll be written with Pulsar.

Because Pulsar isn't available off the desktop, I use Textastic on my iPhone and on the iPad when I can pry that device out of the greedy hands of my children. It's not as customizable as Pulsar/Atom, or more to the point as easy to customize, but it is customizable. Because iOS doesn't work like a regular computer, I use Working Copy to keep my repos synced. It's a truly fantastic app, I have never had a single issue with it.

My favorite terminal emulator is iTerm, a mac-only app. If you're not on Mac, you're on your own. Someday when Apple goes too far, I'll switch to Linux and have to desperately look for a decent emulator. I use Brave for my browser, though I have literally every other browser installed. I do image editing³like all the category icons, fer instance with Pixelmator Pro, a mac graphics tool. It's a fairly handy tool for someone who is less than expert, or artistic for that matter.

Because my employers are dupes, I did all this work⁴not on company time, mind you, I'm not that much of a dick on the blog with an M3 MacBook Pro with 64GB of RAM, running MacOS Tahoe. Apple makes good kit. I've never even seen a laptop that approaches the build quality of a MacBook, let alone matches it. Further, I still hold a three-decade old grudge against MicroSoft, and wouldn't use their products by choice even if you paid me.

I think that covers most if not all of the tools I used to build and write the blog. If I think of anything else, I'll be sure to add it here.