So the date on this post may be wrong by the time you're reading it, mostly because I'm not sure when I'm gonna be done setting up the server, but I hope it's today. However, you probably will have noticed (if you visit my website somewhat regularly) that a lot has changed. It's the migration I was talking about a few posts ago.

To start, let me explain the change in framework: something I've been thinking about lately is the vulnerability of my blog posts, which before were stored in a database file on my VPS. If for any reason I were to lose that data, I'd lose all the blog posts. I was also frustrated with the complicated way of posting new articles that I had setup: I'd write the post in an HTML file on my computer, and then I'd login to my hand-made dashboard on my website, to post it there with all the relevant fields. It seemed like a lot of double work that could be easily simplified.

Luckily for me, due to recent developments with my VPS host, I'm moving services, and I figured I'd take advantage of this to start fresh. So I decided I'd port my website to a static site generator. Originally I was going to use one I had recently created, called sssg, but as I was developing some of the more complex features for it, I discovered that a simple SSG already existed with enough features to give me what I needed: saait. It's quite minimalist and yet it provides me with the features necessary to host all my website's content, such as my blog and news feeds. Now it's all statically generated, so all you're pulling is pre-compiled HTML, and not generated on the spot by a PHP script as it was before.

So, since I'm excited about all the changes I have to my website, I'm going to explain the setup (for the most part).

First, as I've already explained, my website is generated statically with saait on my personal computer. I will likely be creating a git repository where I can host the source for you all to see, since that will also allow me to easily edit my website code from my other computers. Second, I synchronize my website's generated files with the server with RSync. As for the HTTP server I'm using, I've chosen to use lighttpd for simplicity's sake.

I also now have two different modes of newsfeed: Atom and RSS. I also noticed, as someone who uses newsfeeds for a lot websites, that I enjoy those that have the content in the newsfeed itself so I don't have to open up the browser, but can read it right inside my newsfeed application - which, as I mentioned in a previous article, is newsboat - so now for both Atom and RSS feed the entire content of my blog posts is in the newsfeed item itself. If this does present a problem later on, I can change it to only give the description, which will make the XML files lighter to download - currently the Atom feed is 468KB and the RSS feed 440KB, so I don't think it's too much to download.

All in all, I'm quite happy with the way things have turned out, so I hope I'll be able to keep this setup for... at least a few more years.