2023-07-11 Thinking about switching away from Oddmuse

I can hear the Rhône outside. We’re in a hotel in the Goms region, the very beginning of the Rhône. It’s the second week of our trip to the Vallais. – Pictures on the fediverse

Pictures on the fediverse

Things that have been troubling me:

Oddmuse started out as a CGI script written in Perl. This is great for very small and dynamic sites: Most of the time, nobody is visiting and the process isn’t running. As activity increases (and search engines and bots activity increases!) a CGI script is an increasingly bad idea. Every time, you load the Perl binary, it loads the script, parses the script, runs the script, loads the libraries, parses the libraries, and so on.

These days, I run a Mojolicious server which keeps the script in memory and reruns it for every request. The webserver acts as a proxy server for all of this. And it’s somewhat tricky: Every now and then there are processes that won’t die, accumulating, see 2023-06-28 Reduced Site Functionality.

2023-06-28 Reduced Site Functionality

There’s also the problem of comments. I like comments about my posts, most of the time. But there also aren’t a lot. I think it’d be even nicer if people posted their related posts on their own blogs, or their replies on social media, or sent me an email.

I’ve been writing Phoebe, a Gemini-first wiki. It’s also a Mojolicious application. And occasionally it also runs into problems. My Transjovian site has been down, occasionally, needed a restart. And then we get into all the system administration issues: you need systemd or Monit to check the services and to restart them, and on and on.

Phoebe

And then I find something like blg, a static blog generator written in a single fish script, by @jameschip. Perhaps I could use that as a starting point.

blg

@jameschip

I’d want to keep all the main pages of this blog of course. But other than that…

• Generate a static copy of the site, the HTML pages, including comments and images.
• Write a static site generator using a gemtext-like format.
• Write a script that only regenerates the pages that have changed.
• Most importantly, don’t regenerate the HTML pages from the old wiki unless the sources files are touched, since the formatting rules have changed multiple times over the last twenty years.

The first edit on this site was made 2002-06-23. Some pages were part of an earlier, hand-written site.

Anyway, I’d like to keep that, of course. Should I ever want to edit old pages again, of course, I’d have to rewrite the markup. There’s no point in trying to write a parser that handles all the old special cases.

And then, if I still want a comment section, I can reintroduce a CGI script. 😆

Same for search.

​#Blogs

• *2023-07-11**. I do like the ease of adding new comments. Specially when I’m commenting on my own blog.

I also tried to write a quick-and dirty HTML exporter and that didn’t work, so I think I need an even quicker and dirtier exporter!

• *2023-07-12**. I wrote a second HTML exporter that already work much better but it doesn’t create the correct internal links. There, the problem is that the static export adds extensions like “.html” or “.png” when it writes files, and when linking to a page, the link needs to know whether the target is a HTML page or a PNG file so that it, too, can add the appropriate file extension. That wasn’t the case until now.

• *2023-07-14**. I’m starting to think about all the small things I like about the current wiki:

• search
• page title matches
• adding comments on my phone
• tags being used to generate pages called X for the last 10 posts tagged X

Perhaps I should just rewrite the wiki engine. Use a framework like Mojolicious. Drop all the features that part of multi-person wikis like history pages and diffs.

• *2023-07-15**. Or perhaps I should spend more time blocking bots since part of the appeal of a static site is that the optimized file-serving web servers we have is that they can handle the load all these stupid bots and crawlers are causing.

• *2023-07-19**. I really should be thinking about something like Oddmuse, but simpler. It’s still a web server, maybe simpler (hah!) and therefore you can still add comments from a phone and all that, but it definitely saves both the raw text (Gemtext? Markdown?) and the output (HTML) as plain files and allows a web server to serve those.

• *2024-07-11**. I guess it turned into Oddµ.

Oddµ