The return of the blog
by Ketil; January 5, 2012
The end of WordPress
I hope somebody, somewhere, noticed that my blog has been offline for some weeks now. After upgrading the server it runs on, I decided not to continue running the WordPress instance. There are several reasons for that, among others:
- I’m not terribly happy or comfortable running PHP at all,
- I’m not happy about a system that is based on downloading large code dumps and dropping them in specific directories.
- I was never very comfortable with the web-editing widgets.
- My installation was hacked.
I think the last points illustrates the problems with the first two.
Anyway, having made the decision to bid farewell, I looked for alternatives. Somebody suggested that I might not need a full content manangement system, but should look into static site generating systems, like Hakyll. This is it.
Using Hakyll
Hakyll is really rather simple to use: there’s a blog example included, and I just snarfed that with some modifications. There’s a main file (hakyll.hs) which directs how everything is to be constructed, a template directory, a css directory, and a posts directory. Adding posts means writing a markdown file, and stuffing it in “posts”. All under version control, of course.
Plans for the future
I can’t, of course, simply discard all my old posts, irreplaceable treasures of our cultural heritage as they are. Currently, they’re all 503’ed, but you can find some of them in the Wayback Machine. When time allows, I’ll have to bring the old MySQL instance up, and somehow extract the text in a useful format.
Since this site is now static, there isn’t, and won’t be, a comment field. With WP, it was all spam anyway, and we can all discuss stuff on Google+, Reddit, or wherever. What I do want to do, is to provide a “comment section” with backlinks to any mentions of my posts. Probably, I’ll mine the Apache logs for referring sites, and possibly also use Google search. We’ll see what I can come up with.
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