Moving site to wintersmith

Recently I had to upgrade server, and found that ancient technologies are not available anymore. So I had to look for a new solution

A long time ago in another galaxy (or better said in another century) I created my website using technologies available back then:

At this time there was no java (it was invented and published a year after this) - so there was really no other choice. HTML::Mason was wonderfull templating tool - with components, conditional includes, full power of perl inside your ureadable HTML - and also long and cryptic stacktraces:

    <& page_start , title=>'Welcome', 
          keywords_en=>'google,competence,webmaster,skills,content,validation,projekte,projects,fun,',
          description_en=>'Konstantin Pribluda is freelance software consulter based in Wiesbaden, Germany.',
          keywords_de=>'google,competence,webmaster,skills,content,validation,projekte,projects,fun,meta',
          description_de=>'Freiberuchlicher Software Entwickler, Konsultant und Dozent.Ich biete Dienstlesistungen rund um Software-Entwicklung in java'
    &>

    <div class="section-head">
          Welcome
    </div>
    <p>

which would include page_start component with all the paameters rendered to plain HTML:

    <html>
        <head>
            <title>
            Konstantin Pribluda homepage -  <% $title %>
            </title>
            <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
            <meta name="robots" content="index">
            <meta name="robots" content="follow">
            <meta name="author" content="Konstantin Pribluda">
        %if($keywords_en) {        
            <meta name="keywords" lang="en" content="<%  $keywords_en %>">
        %}  
        %if($description_en) {    
            <meta name="description" lang="en" content="<% $description_en %>">
        %} 
        %if($keywords_de) {                    
            <meta name="keywords" lang="de" content="<%  $keywords_de %>"/>
        %}  
        %if($description_de) {
            <meta name="description" lang="de" content="<% $description_de %>"/>
        %}

This was nice and cosy tempating solution, type 1 MVC , but as time went by, new perl versions came, and all the libraries for databases and whatever were also upgraded - so it was almost impossible to upgrade to new version. And as my hosting provider came wth new and amazing hardware updates, there was no choice but to look for something new.

Requirements

After programming websites for my customers I have pretty clear view of what I do not like to have on my server:

  • nothing java based
  • no databases
  • no standard full fledged CMS
  • basically nothing on the serverside unless absolutely necessary

But:

  • sane templating (with includes, reusable components, some logic)
  • writing my text in markdown. HTML sucks.
  • static website with reasonable ampunt of javascript where necessary
  • as few boilerplate as possible
  • easy deployment (just run a script, or git pull or whatever)

So my natural choice was some static website generator. I went shopping and found wintersmith. Posts are in markdown, templating with jade, CSS with less/sass. So here is new website. For now it is just basic wintersmith blog but will be updated in future. See the sources on github