I’ve made some changes to this site. In some ways, they are only small changes, but under the hood, they are quite large.

The first change is that each blog entry here now has its own URL. We can debate whether or not I had permalinks the old way: it depends if you accept the fragment identifier in a URL (the part after the hash mark) as part of the permalink. Reddit does not recognize the fragment identifier as part of the URL (something that was pointed out to me by a commenter there), and so it was difficult for them (and probably other sites) to link accurately here. With the new scheme, I hope we can all agree that there are now permalinks.

One of the complexities in writing your own blog software is defending deviations from the norm. The old way of identifying blog posts was different than the vast majority of blog systems out there, so it eventually seemed not just different but truly odd, and incompatibilities with other important parts of the web ecosystem made it actually broken. So now I have one URL per blog post.

The aversion to differences can go too far. Another commenter on reddit also noted that my comment links said “5 reactions” instead of “5 comments”, adding, “wtf?”. Maybe he was kidding. In any case, tough on that one. You’re a human, you can adapt.

As a result of the page-per-post change, comments are handled differently as well. Gone is the pop-up window for entering or reading comments: they are displayed on the page with the post. This presented a typographic challenge — how to visually distinguish the comments from the post itself, without overwhelming the page with rules and dividers? I had long admired Gravatar as being a clever and lightweight way to let people control their appearance on other people’s sites. Adding them to the comments solved the design problem: they added a strong visual element to the comments section, and helped divide one comment from the next without slicing the page into ribbons.

Because most of my commenters don’t have gravatars, I am using automatically-assigned pictures when a gravatar is not available. There are a couple of hundred of these impersonal avatars, and they are assigned based on a hash of your email and site addresses, so you should get the same one each time. The photos are either ones I have taken, or from the public domain category at Wikimedia Commons. None of the impersonal avatars show a person, so if you see a face next to a comment, it is genuine!

Those are the visible changes. The invisible change is how this site is produced. The original technique involved a great deal of XSLT. I started adding the permalink structure with the old XSLT code, and it became too difficult. The old design finally gave out. Now I am using Django, but in an unconventional way. I don’t use a Django-friendly host, and my commenting system is written in PHP. Both are obstacles that can be overcome, but I decided not to take them on now.

So I use Django, but create static HTML files with it, then upload the files to my hosting provider. Jared Kuolt’s StaticGenerator was a piece of serendipity that appeared after I decided on a course of action, but before I needed to write the code myself. The site starts with the same pile of XML source files, but now they are used to build a SQLite database, which is then used by the Django code to produce the HTML files.

So in a few ways, I’ve smoothed out some of the idiosyncrasy behind the scenes of this blog, which makes me feel good. I’m glad to have had a chance to make changes on this scale.

Everything should be working just as before, but there may be some hiccups. If you see anything amiss, please let me know!