This is a “retroactive” blog entry :). It took me about 3 months to switch all my 200+ web pages from DreamWeaver to Jekyll. Now I will tell a little of it. Loads of work. Why? Apart from liking new computing approaches, I knew that my venerable DreamWeaver will die when Apple in their wisdom decide that, after the summer 2019 OSX update, 32-bit programs will not run any more.
Of course I also wanted to switch from raw html coding to a nice CMS. Furthermore, a programmatic approach would be nice, because the 100+ illusion pages are very similarly structured.
There are 2 major types of CMSs, dynamic and static.
- Dynamic means that the site only exists within database structures and the appropriate html is created on demand. They also easy things like comments. Dynamic pages by necessity introduce a response delay and represent a horrible waste of computation resources on the server – we don’t notice it, but it demands electricity all the same. Yes, there are caching techniques, but still… A further major disadvantage is that this architecture represents a large attack surface. I tried WordPress for a while, and was flabbergasted by the amount of attacks directed every few minutes at it, trying to gain admin rights.
- Static CMSs are typically on one’s own machine. A frequent approach is to use a local folder hierarchy to model the site organisation. Pages are written in some friendly format, e.g. Markdown, decorated with meta info (e.g. in the “front matter”), and then processed to produce the final site, to be uploaded.
To keep this entry at manageable length, let’s just mention that I chose the static CMS Jekyll. More later.