Version 6

Welcome to Version 6 of this website. As promised a few months ago, I decided to take this website, which has been using the Pelican static site generator since 2014, and rewrite it to use the Zola static site generator. This was a pretty painless process; I wrote some Python scripts to take all the Pelican markdown and convert it to Zola format1 and to generate redirects for all the old URLs.

Some notable changes:

  • I've removed commenting functionality; Commento's spam filtering has gotten really lousy the last few months and I'm tired of having to translate and delete a bunch of Hindi spam posts every morning.
  • Building the site from scratch now takes ~1s instead of ~3s. (woo)
  • A bunch of the repetitive inline HTML in posts has been rewritten as shortcodes
  • There's now only an Atom feed (no RSS 2.0), at least until this item gets resolved upstream
  • I removed the tag cloud from the sidebar because it seemed too noisy
  • All the pages have new permalinks, but there are redirects at the old URLs, so hopefully I'm still in compliance with the "Cool URLs Don't Change" rule.
  1. Mostly, this just entailed changing the format of the front-matter to TOML and adding newlines between footnotes in the Markdown.


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