Welcome To My New Site

Posted on 22 May 2013 by Marcelo Moreira — Permalink

Welcome to the new Marcelo@Stanford site !!!

I have finally migrated from my old and outdated Wiki site.

It was good while it lasted but there were so many problems there…

What happened to the old site ?

The old site was a Wiki, based on the fantastic DokuWiki software. I immensely thank the authors for sharing and making it so available.

This is what happened:

1. Indeed, a Wiki has a great collaborative aspect. But that was simply not being taken advantage of. It was only me making the changes anyways…
2. I needed to do some major rework to the URL space using Apache rewrite rules to get rid of the weird cgi-bin naming that Stanford imposed in the web pages. I was constantly tumbling there.
3. It simply felt into a big void: no updates were being made anymore (I have no one else to blame other than myself)

Why I made a new site ?

There were several reasons for that. They are (not in any specific order):

1. I wanted to play with static content generators: I really do like the idea - you create content based on a markdown language, and then it gets converted to a static site based on a template.
2. I wanted something fast: Yes… something even faster than a wiki. With a static site, all content is already generated. There is no dynamic processing of any kind.
3. I wanted to learn it: I saw this post and it inspired me. I really liked the approach and decided to play with it. Since I am not a big fan of Ruby (sorry Ruby folks…), I immediately searched for something in Python. I found Pelican !
4. I wanted to share more easily: by being allowed to make the posts in a flexible and portable markdown language, I am future-proofing my posts. I am not particularly stuck to a specific wiki syntax. There were a few options available, but I decided to start small and go with Markdown.
5. I wanted version control: This is absolutely a must !!! No questions asked. I use git for pretty much everything I do. I use GitHub a lot as well. The idea was to integrate the commit process to an auto-deployment hook that generates the site and deploys it on demand, every time there is a new post (or change). I will provide more details on this in another post.
6. I wanted flexibility: This is another must. I want to be able to theme my site in whatever way I want. I also want to be able to deploy it however and wherever I want. That way I retain full control and full flexibility. My posts and data are not stuck in a database somewhere else, and I don’t need to limit myself to a select hand of templates with somewhat limited flexibility. Plus, with auto-deployment, I can just make a change to my git repository (only directly at GitHub, for example) and have it publish it automatically, and with all the features above.

What to expect ?

I hope that this new model works better, and gets updated more often and does not fall back too behind like the old site.

I am in the process of converting some data from the old Wiki. It might take a while…

I am also perfecting the auto-deployment process. I will make another post about it in the future.

You can find the source code for this site in github.

I also plan on making some improvements to the template. Maybe something based on the Stanford Modern template, like this page.

In the mean time, please check back often.

My most sincere thanks for listening…

~marcelo