My Protanopic Life

Well, my site has gone through a massive transformation so I thought I'd write a bit about it, seeing as how I wrote about it back in 2009 when I was first putting it up on Wordpress. Over the years I found myself disabling several of the dynamic features like page comments. I was also hacked with an attack that stored the exploit inside of the database. This was an interesting attack because my page appeared fine to everybody except google bots. I also found that doing mass modifications of posts was difficult using the wordpress UI. To work around this I thought I might look into using the Wordpress API, but by this time I was pretty much done wanting to write PHP. The web host that I had been using for over 10 years had been slowly reducing its features and had passed a point where it was worth paying for. So, during a Yelp hackathon in November 2016 I migrated all of my old wordpress content to Pelican, a static blogging engine written in Python. I moved hosting of my site from my old VPS to Github Pages. So far it's been working out great. I've lost the ability to write server-side dynamic features, which is something I didn't really care about doing, but I've also lost the ability to get hacked through my db, and gained the ability to make changes en masse using familiar filesystem level tools like sed and whatnot. I can track changes in git, which is also very familiar and integrates with many things. All in all I'd say this is a nearly perfect win. The only thing I really miss is having a remote shell available from not my house and not my work. I'm sure if I ever need one I can easily spin up an EC2 or Digital Ocean instance to handle my needs better than my old VPS was.