Moving to a Static Site
Image Attribution:
Ronald Yang. "Untitled Photo". June 12, 2015. Under a Creative Commons 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication) License (NOT a CC-BY 4.0 License). Post-processed by Rimu Shuang.
November 13, 2016
moving, django, hakyll
I’ve moved to a static site (specifically from Django to Hakyll)!
I found myself not spending any time maintaining my Django website. Now I have nothing against Django itself; it’s a great web framework that has only gotten even better with its latest releases. Unfortunately, it had two drawbacks which were amplified when I didn’t maintain the website. These drawbacks are not specific to Django, but rather to any software fully responsible for maintaining a dynamic website.
Security: Django, like any other web-facing piece of software, comes out with new security bug fixes all the time. Quite naturally, due to constraints of effort and time, the Django team chooses to only support the most recent couple of versions of Django with these security fixes.
I was still on Django 1.6 and simply didn’t have the interest nor time in keeping my eye on current Django security bugs and upgrading my site as necessary. Even though I didn’t have anything valuable on my website, I owe the greater Internet community to do my part to prevent my website from being scooped up into a botnet.
Reproducibility: Increasingly I’ve become focused on making sure that my computing life is reproducible with a minimum of human effort. I’m never going to remember the hacks I did to make something work unless I have the machine do it for me (or record it here!).
In order to keep my software usable when my interest is no longer on it, I need to automate set up as much as possible. A dynamic website has a bit too many moving parts (mainly surrounding DB setup and authentication).
All I really had was a bunch of slow-changing HTML files I needed served up. And there were plently of players in the market who could take care of security for me for free, while reproducibility went up with the removal of mutable components such as the DB and user accounts.
Now of course there are many different static site generators out there. The reason why I chose Hakyll is simply because of the amount of flexibility it offered. For math heavy posts I prefer to use LaTeX and for other posts I prefer to use Markdown. Sometimes I’ll experiment with other formats as I see fit.
Hakyll is basically a front-end to the amazing pandoc, which makes it uniquely awesome at handling all the file formats under the sun and converting them into HTML.
So what about that “Popular Posts” thing you see below then? Well it only updates every time I redeploy this site. Yep. Not dynamic at all. Not even automatic.
I might put the effort into getting some sort of CI set up for this static website and then at least it can be a bit more automatic.
But for now I’m happy with where I’ve landed with this project so far. Maybe in a couple of months I’ll try to improve where I’m at right now with better infrastructure. Thanks a ton for all the software you guys have made, Django team, Jasper Van der Jeugt, and John MacFarlane! Building my own humble little website off the shoulders of giants and all…