I updated my site. Previously I was using a custom Symfony 2 install with a simple data model; but that was overkill for a blog (which I rarely post to anyway) and I didn’t do a great job of keeping it well maintained. This is a bad for a few reasons;
- I had the mental burden of responsibility for maintaining it
- I needed a specific environment to host it
- Symfony was just the framework I was excited about at the time; it was way overkill for a personal blog and I’d rather spend my time elsewhere
All said; it was a lot of cost (and technical complexity!) for a system that practically generates static pages; so I’m just moving to an offline system that generates static pages (Hexo) using somebody else’s code
This has a couple of advantages
- The deployed code is just HTML; all I need to keep up-to-date is a webserver and I can probably find somebody else to do that (github pages?)
- The data model is sufficiently portable (it’s just markdown files) that can be transferred into any other blog software; or just Github Pages at some point
- Hexo seems relatively stable/boring and hasn’t moved fast over the last several years. This is nice! I don’t want it to change much, just continue to work
And comes with a couple of problems
- If I want to write a blog post, I need to set my local device up with node/npm/etc.
- This might need to be repeated every time I write a post (though this is probably not frequent)
I’m also migrating from the domain tobias.wooldridge.id.au to the simpler thw.au because the former is too long and tricky to spell (both first name and last name), thanks to the .au eTLD coming online!