Bryce's Blog

Hello there everyone,

As most of you guys may or may not have noticed, depending on how well I was able to get redirects established, things look quite a bit differently or work a bit differently.

While Habari was great in many ways, it has not always been able to live up to my needs, but I had mostly decided to live with it since there were things present that I could not easily replicate on other platforms, and other platforms either had problems I did not want my visitors to deal with, as was the case with S9y, or, like WordPress, were heavily targetted, and I see attempts at accessing such flaws in access and error logs.

However, I have become tired of having to deal with the usual inconveniences of using a CMS, such as having to back up not only site files but also the databases housing the content, and checking to make sure that my CMS of choice was supported by a certain host, since I have switched servers quite a few times over the life of this blog, and decided to look into using a SSG to create content.

When it comes to SSGs, there are a ton of them out there from Jekyll to MetalSmith and more, but I only had experience with Jekyll and Hyde, and liked how easy it was to get Python up and running regardless of operating system, whether it was BSD and Linux, which I have experimented with, Mac, which I used to use in my daily life, or Windows, which I returned to after seeing the direction Apple was going, but Hyde just did not make the cut for anything more than simple sites and I wanted to learn a bit about a different system by making a theme for it, so I decided to give Pelican a try.

After spending quite a few days trying to figure things out, I was able to replicate a few things from Habari plugins that I used, such as being able to enter a certain string and get an absolute address, though I needed to make a plugin to make those same changes in the ATOM feeds, and determined that I had put in enough things that I might as well switch over to the platform, especially considering how many tasks the server that hosts this blog had to deal with would decrease dramatically, and possibly speed up load times.

Now, I have finally made that switch, and currently writing this post, the first one actually written on the platform, I can say that I am glad that I made the switch, as virtual machines are no longer necessary to create reliable backups.

Unfortunately, many people will be experiencing some problems with the incoming links found on the Internet, such as shared reviews and easy to access feeds, and this post was made to let everyone know that things did not just up and disappear because they still exist.

The old posts and pages all have the same addresses, but now requires an .html extension, and feed addresses for all content and content dealing with certain subjects is now located in the navigation, the latter of which should appear when viewing category pages and posts filed under that particular category.

Hopefully, you all like the changes as much as I do, even though there are some minor inconveniences, and that this will be the last major move that I would be making, but time will tell.