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+title = "Website refactor"
+date = 2020-05-07T15:31:16Z
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+
+A couple of months ago I had decided to completely refactor my website and blog.
+Finally I have done so, and even though I think it still needs some work, I am
+much more happy now with it than before.
+
+<!-- more -->
+
+It's been more than a week since I've actually migrated my site to the new
+format, but I haven't had the time to write about it, being all busy with my
+thesis work. Actually, I am writing this while I am waiting for some stuff that
+I need for my work to compile.
+
+## The old site
+
+One thing that I didn't quite like about it, was that it was pretty bloated
+having used Django just for a little personal weblog site. It's not like there
+is something inherently wrong about using Django or something similar. I really
+liked to use it at the beginning since it is a pretty useful and comfortable
+framework to use, especially when you are a beginner. The problem is that it
+comes with a lot of bells and whistles that you most probably don't need,
+especially if you're just making a small personal weblog. But this wasn't even
+the main reason I decided to completely redo it.
+
+However, the main reason why I decided to completely refactor my site, was that
+over the last couple of years since I first started my site, my overall workflow
+and the way I use computers had fundamentally changed, and I now found it quite
+uncomfortable to publish to and manage my site. I just find very jarring to use
+web interfaces for "productivity".
+
+The way I would publish posts and do most of the "managing" of my weblog, was
+through the "admin" panel that I would access with my browser through a special
+URL. As I said, web interfaces are not my cup of tea, and that includes typing
+and redacting articles or posts. I have a nice and comfy setup of neovim which I
+actually use to type and redact almost all of the text that I have to write on
+my computer. And so I wanted to type my articles on vim, and preferably not even
+have to leave the comfort of my terminal to manage my site.
+
+## The new site
+
+The last post that I wrote before refactoring my website, actually covers most
+of my thoughts on this topic, so I'll just mention what "technologies" I ended
+up using for my new site.
+
+In that post I mentioned that I wanted to migrate from a relational DB based
+blog to an SSG system, and that's what I ended up doing. I chose zola over other
+SSGs because that's the one that I found the most comfortable to use and the
+most fitting for my needs, at least for now.
+
+I could have just ended up making a completely static site with pure html and
+would have also been better than using Django, but I find markdown to be much
+more nicer to edit and read for simple texts, and I wanted to automate certain
+things such as templating, without having to mess too much with it myself.
+
+I also ended up using a CI/CD system so that my site would get deployed and
+built automatically each time that I push to master on my "git server". I am
+using Gitea as a kind of git server, and Drone as the CI/CD system. So now all I
+have to do when I want to publish a new article, is write the article, commit
+the changes on my local repository, push the changes to Gitea on my master
+branch, and then Drone will pick up the push event and automatically build and
+deploy the updated site to my VPS.
+
+The only significant problems that arose from this migration is that some URLs
+have changed, notably the RSS URL, but also that the URLs for blog posts are no
+longer under categories, but directly under the /weblog/ URL. They can still be
+accessed using the old URLs though, since I put some rewrite rules in nginx so
+that it would redirect from the old URLs to the new format.
+
+Overall, I am much happier with my website and weblog now, and I hope that I
+will be publishing some new stuff here, even if nobody really reads this.
+Although in some cases that old bit might make it a bit more compelling to write
+certain things :)
+
+The source for my website is hosted at
+[https://git.yaroslavps.com/yaroslav/yaroslavps.com](https://git.yaroslavps.com/yaroslav/yaroslavps.com)