Site Updates
So I changed a couple of things on this website.
Firstly, I disabled Disqus comments from the blog. The service does a lot of cross-site shenanigans that have the potential to be a huge privacy violation. And anyway, nobody's ever used it except for me, the time I tested Disqus to see if it worked.
If you want to comment on a blog post, feel free to send me email and I'll update the post if I think it's relevant.
Secondly, I made a few small changes to the way some pages are laid out. This was part of completely rewriting how the non-blog parts of this site are rendered.
The website is generated from a collection of text files via a Perl
script, all of which are stored in a git repository. Previously,
that script invoked Infernal Icecube to do the rendering. The
problem with this is that ii is pretty much abandoned, so updating
the website usually involved first figuring out what dependency got
left behind in the last system update. Also, ii wasn't in the repo,
so I often had to first find a copy and install it. (It also doesn't
help that macOS has a case-insensitive filesystem and the ii repo
contains a file named ii and a directory named II in the root.)
I replaced it all with a script that renders using Text::Markdown,
which I snagged and checked into the repo along with the rest of the
site. Now, the only external dependencies are perl, make and
rsync.
This meant that I had to manually convert my content from Infernal
Icecube's markup format to Markdown. Fortunately, ii markup is
basically an independent reinvention of Markdown, so that was pretty
straightforward.
None of this should change how the site looks, but having had to review the entire site meant I saw its shortcomings anew, and so I've fixed a few things here and there. That's all.
# Posted 2017-09-10 21:23:46 UTC; last changed 2017-09-10 21:25:14 UTC