Welcome to the exact same blog I’ve already introduced you to before, only now with Less Features (tm).
Wait, What?#
That’s right. No longer does this blog use WordPress, the PHP programming language, or (gasp) a database. For those of you not interested in technobable, this ultimately means nothing.
The content you’ve read before is in roughly the same location and in roughly the same format. Only, now the posts that make up this website load way faster. Like way faster. Plus, I pay nothing to run this website anymore, which is $6 less than what I was paying before. And did I say the website is fast now?
Less Features (tm)#
For those interested, I recently switched this blog over from a WordPress site to a Hugo site using the amazing Blowfish theme for Hugo. Hugo is a static site generator which means I don’t actually have a webserver running any code or a database to track information.
All of the posts are created from plain text files, and all of the pages are pure HTML, meaning there isn’t some web app trying to reconstruct the page anew each time someone tries to read it. What I gained in speed I lost in some functionality, namely the ActivityPub integration, which is fine since I wasn’t making much use of it anyway, even if it was nice to publish to the Fediverse on a regular basis.
There isn’t a whole lot I can do in that regard because the full implementation of ActivityPub requires a webserver and a database to function. However, my next goal for this website is to at least make it a static feed in the Fediverse so people can follow it on Mastodon, at the very least. Doing that will require me to set up some barebones ActivityPub behavior and maybe even an edge function or two.
The Same Features (But Different)#
Some things have changed, but also stayed the same. Instead of using WordPress comments, this site now uses Cactus Comments , which is an open source, federated comments client. It uses Matrix encrypted conversations as the basis for comments, with each post representing it’s own chat room. For now, I have made it so that commenters must have a Matrix account to comment. I may change this in the future, but it makes manual moderation a bit easier for me in the short term.
Edit 11/20/24#
You knew this wouldn’t last! My blog is now using Webmentions, a new protocol for sending and receiving social feedback on posts from all over the internet, not just on this website! Scroll down to the new comments section to learn more.
What Now?#
Probably more posts about writing constraints and experimental literature. Stay tuned!
