Blog updates 2022

So once again I find myself needing to update my blog platform. Ghost has a dependency issue which has brought to light that they don’t actually support MariaDB as the backend storage, they only support MySQL. I’m not going to use an Oracle product if I can avoid it, and it’s time to revisit things anyway, so I started looking at other options.

Back in 2015 I looked at static site generation tools, and had actually settled on using Nikola for a while, but it was a bit too unweildy and annoying, and perhaps I was pickier about what I wanted at that time.

Now in 2022 I’m definitely looking for fewer dependencies so static is back, and github has private repos for free accounts, and generally I’m less stressed about getting things working perfectly.

And here we are.

The site is all static, built using Jekyll and using the great Minimal Mistakes theme (links at the bottom of each page). Luckily there’s a Jekyll importer that reads Ghost blog export, so most of the heavy lifting was done, I just needed to do some cleanup.

An additional change is I’m going to start using my devilops.ca site, which has been sitting idle for years, for all my technical geeky posts. So this blog will only have more general stuff. I will be setting up redirects to the old posts so they’re still findable via search.

I’m going back through and removing a bunch of old posts that are no longer relevant or make me wince or that I just don’t like.

Also header images seem tricky, or at least require resizing, so all of those are gone. And the movie snippets I’d added for reviews did not transfer over well, I’ll be working on those.

That’s it for now – as with every time I change things, here’s hoping it results in more updates.