Website reboot

As I mentioned earlier in the year, I got tired of Wordpress and it fighting me with posting code. So here’s the new site, rewritten using Django, Pygments, Python-Markdown, Static Generator, and the Django Basic Apps (just the blog portion). I also wanted the site to be more friendly presenting code, so I changed the main column to be wide enough to avoid having to excessively wrap the lines.

It took me much longer to write the HTML and CSS than anything else–and I still have more that I want to tweak! It also took considerable time trying to figure out a useful IT setup. As you can see by now, I’ve moved the site off of an old box in a corner to a VPS managed by SliceHost. I really like their setup, and if you want to use Django, then SuperJared has some wonderful tools and tips. In the end, I chose to use Nginx and a fastcgi backend for the blog. I was really hoping for an alternative to Gallery2, but I couldn’t find anything that worked the way I wanted and looked halfway decent.

I intend to make the code that drives this site open source. I haven’t quite figured out what my plans are on that front. I may end up hosting my own Trac instance, or using something like Launchpad. I have several projects I’d like to push out there though.

Oh, and I’ve revisited my comments policy and a colleague has all but convinced me to enable them. However, Django’s comments system was changed at the last minute, so I’m going to wait it out a little while longer while django-comment-utils catches up. Besides that, I need to style the comment forms and such.

I’ve done my best to preserve everything, and even went back and corrected a couple broken links in the original articles. I hope you enjoy the new site!