My website has been migrated from Joomla to Jekyll! The reason is that I realised that my website is actually static: nothing much happens in it (nobody should be able to register, add or modify content dynamically, etc.). It’s just a bunch of static files.
I initially chose Joomla for the power on one hand and ease of use on the other hand. One of the things I needed was comments; another thing was a downloads plugin. Both were available as Joomla plugins back in the 1.5 days. Forward to Joomla 3 days, and I noticed that neither of the two were needed any more. Comments were implemented as a plugin still, but they linked to Disqus, which means that their servers handled the dynamic contents. Downloads were all moved to ownCloud (now NextCloud).
Fast forward to today, and turns out that one can just have static HTML files with Disqus embedded into it to handle everything. In a sense, everything has gone full circle: I started with a static HTML site too, but quickly dropped it since managing changes in the menu was too much of a hassle. Jekyll now generates HTML files, which solves the problem yet keeps the pages static.
Why are static pages good? For one, the HTTP server that I’m using, NGINX, just so happens to excel at serving static HTML files. If one is requested, it immediately throws it at the client. And since it’s static, it’s also cached on the client, so the next visit is completely instantaneous. Another nice thing about it, and actually the reason why I switched now, is that it doesn’t involve PHP or SQL whatsoever. Therefore bugs in them no longer apply. As it just so happens that critical bugs in Joomla have just been identified. So static pages are a huge win for security, which is very important nowadays!
The migration is not completely finished yet, mind you. You will see 404s when following some links. That’s to be expected and will be fixed in the future. Also, all the projects are now neatly arranged in the Projects page. It might seem awkward at the moment, though, since it expects to draw images where there are none. That will also be fixed eventually, by putting game icons or preview images there.
One more change is that I merged “Blog” into “News”, and renamed “Articles” to “Blog”. This is to differentiate between scientific articles and what I previously called articles (howtos, reviews, etc. which are honestly blog material). And lastly, I’ll see if I can update my YouTube To Do list (under “About me”) soon!
Comments are always welcome!