Woo, site relaunch.

Yeah, I'mma be honest here. That old site design? Not my style. This is more my jam. Just looks clean, smart and easy. Good categorization, own options for grouping, what can I say? I'll be using this from now on.

Let's do a quick techdive so everyone now knows how this site is constructed and why it's technically so much better than my old one.

Also I spend like, 3 days on this and I need to do this now and fix stuff later because otherwise I'm gonna go mad.

Static site

So, this time around, everything you see is static. And when I say everything, I mean everything. There's no backend this time. All you're seeing is served straight-up from nginx! The reason I can do this is because this time around, I'm using a static site generator, which brings with it a ton of advantages. Let me just go over a few:

• Lower security risk - everything is there, everything is public, there's nothing to exploit.
• CI releases - Clean, makes sure I don't have to publish it manually (I have not yet set this up however, but it is on The List)
• Privacy focused; because it's all static, my privacy policy (which didn't exist before but now does) is very simple to understand.
• Fast - Nginx prides itself on speed, and so will my blog. There's nothing to process, no backend to reach, just sweet, sweet content.

But, I hear you ask, no plead! How did you accomplish this marvel of technology? Well, I'm so glad you asked.

Pelican

The magic sauce this time around is pelican. Think of it like Jekyll, but unlike Jekyll, Pelican will (hopefully) not make you hurt yourself. It's easily extendible, it's build time is decently quick, I can get a quick look at it and it just works like a charm.

The theme this time around isn't a straight knockoff; that just wasn't cool last time and we're not doing it this time. Instead, it's a pretty heavily modified version of eev.ee's theme.¹ Looks a lot more like me. I'll also openly disclose that I spend several hours gushing at how pretty I think the site's title looks this time around! It's all pixely and it's just so mmmm that good kinda retro. I'm loving it.

And it builds so fast too, it's like fucking sonic the hedgehog in here.

Alright, alright I'll stop gushing. Let's talk features.

New features

• There's a search bar! It doesn't use google! I was super stoked to find this as an option and while it required some fiddling to be functional, here you go!
• Finally I can promote my social media accounts alongside the rest of my site without it being weird.
• See that sidebar? It scrolls with you! Any good sidebar has to scroll imo. Otherwise it's just a bad sidebar.
• There's this super cool, no bullshit archive view that lets you see every post ever made. Which pretty much is an eternal reminder for me that I need to write more blogs, so that's less cool for me. Still, I like it!
• You can now finally look stuff up both by tags and by the broad category.
• The background is a comfy purple now. Not agressive, but peaceful. The right zen between light and dark color schemes.
• Mobile support is now finally first class. Yay!

Not so new stuff

The old blog posts are all here. You can find them under the migrated category.

The future

With this more wide format, easier to understand and read site, I hope that this will make my blog look finally a bit more acceptable. There's some stuff to be done still; for example while CI deployment is an option, at the moment I'm still doing all that manually and that just won't do. I want to add a comment section (if you check the source code of the site you might have an idea what engine I plan to use), so that people can actually interact with me. I still need to work on readding some share buttons, if anyone has an idea on how to do that without making the footer of my website look like a fucking adbar, please @ me somewhere, you can find my socials in the sidebar.

Also happy halloween everybody.

1. Hey, noirscape from the future here (18-11-21). I just want to get it out there that I do not endorse eevee or any of her actions and opinions. I've since the publication of this article been made aware of some facts involving her and her partner and I'd prefer it to be very clear that I don't endorse any of it. ↩