Over the weekend I had a brainstorm and made quite a few changes to this web site. I have been using a Ruby script and regular expressions to generate all my non blog pages. Basically, the script reads an XHTML source file, wraps it with headers, footers, and a nav bar, and writes out a fully formatted HTML file. Now this script has evolved from earlier simple CMS systems. On my old web site, I did the same sort of thing using XSLT. I even wrote my own Atom and RSS feeds for that system.
But of late, I have been on a simplicity kick. For example, this blog is created and hosted on Blogger. Now I used Wordpress for a couple of years. It is a great piece of software and works great. But I really got tired of the software patches and updates I kept having to make. Backing up the data. Migrating the data to a new version. Yuck! I'd rather be doing something else.
So I realized there was no point to maintaining the script. Sure the pages will load slightly faster if its static HTML. But, if I convert the pages to PHP, I get the same output without a build step. Plus the actual source pages are cleaner and easier to maintain. So I've converted the whole site to PHP. If you have any links to content pages, you will need to change the .html to a .php.
I have been holding off on any migration of pages from my old site to this one until I was sure I had things like I want them. I think I have reached that point. So hopefully in the next few months I will be post links to new content as well as some migrated content.
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