Site History Sat, Feb 27, 2016

Recently switched the static generator behind this web log again. Lets take a minute to reflect on the sortid history of this steaming pile.

I lost whatever content I had created early on (pre 2002-ish). Too many system changes back then. Running the whole thing on a little Linux workstation in the basement of our house. Mail server, web server, personal workstation. Good stuff.

The original version was written in C++. I found the code a few years back and couldn’t recognize any of it. More than a decade has passed since I last wrote any C++ and could hardly believe that what I had found was anything I had actually written.

Then came the pure python years. No framework, just using some old publisher library. Can’t even remember and don’t care to look for what it was. I remember thinking it was super cool at the time. Hooked directly into apache somehow.

Somewhere in here I decided using a wiki - MoinMoin - would be great. Looking back on the amount of posts created I might have been right. Using a wiki did make it easy to throw a simple idiotic post up on a whim. So maybe not so dumb after some reflection.

Customizing it was troublesome, so I ditched the wiki and wrote something in Django.

Now here’s where the gray hairs set in. By that time this site was running on various virtual servers and bumping around to and fro. Installing a database and migrating setups was becoming less and less appealing each time I did it. Once upon a time that would have seemed like roaring fun. Not anymore.

Enter the static site generator. Easy right? Bang out some text, run a script - instant web site. And it is too. Started off using tinkerer a few years ago. Tinkerer is based on the sphinx document generator that Python uses. Very simple, but again rather inflexible about how it works. Good and the bad.

So where to? I’ve become a big fan of Go (programming language) and have been watching the development of Hugo for some time. After a couple of false starts I finally got the template layout to fit in my small brain. Now it’s super easy to update posts, and it looks like I want, and flexible enough to do almost anything I’d like to do given the time.

And this is where we are today.