Enter... The Dork Side

The Dork Side Returns!

WordPress... what a disaster!

The previous version of my blog, thedorkside.com, was deployed on WordPress and it became a total mess:

tons of spam comments,
frequent security vulnerabilities in WordPress, and
the site looked cluttered and antiquated.

Furthermore, creating posts with WordPress requires using a poorly implemented web interface, which discouraged me from writing posts.

Pelican static site generator to the rescue!

Pelican is a Python-based static site generator that I'll be using for this blog going forward. There are many benefits I anticipate from moving to Pelican:

I can use my preferred text editor Vim to construct posts using Markdown, which is about as frictionless as it gets. I'm hoping this will encourage me to post more often.
Not that it will be noticable very often, but a static site will render more quickly in the browser than dynamically generated WordPress content.
Many of the themes available for Pelican are very clean and visually appealing.
The code syntax highlighting provided by Pelican appears to be a major improvement over what I was using in Wordpress.
It's going to be easier (I hope) to integrate other sources of content (such as Jupyter notebook output) into the blog. My initial investigations into this are encouraging.
Because each post is a separate Markdown file, my content is portable and and easy to version control in Git. By contrast, WordPress stores posts in a database. Exporting my posts from WordPress was inconvenient and converting them into a text representation suitable for this blog implementation was a major pain, as I might cover in a future post.
WordPress uses PHP (yuck), whereas Pelican is Python-based.

What's next

This is what you can expect to see going forward:

I'll probably try out a few different themes over the next few months. What's nice about Pelican's modular design is that themes can be easily modified or swapped without altering the content.
I'll migrate some of the better and more evergreen content from my previous blog to this one. I attempted to export and transfer all past posts from Wordpress to this blog, but it became clear that wasn't going to be a great approach for a variety of reasons. It's probably better to select past posts judiciously anyway.
I'm going to try to test the limits of what a static site generator can do. Here are some examples I have in mind:
- Rendering Jupyter notebook output for the presentation of data visualizations and analysis results.
- Rendering of interactive dashboard type output,
- Integration of third-party and/or dynamic content such as comments (though this looks easy from what I've seen online).
- Output such as sidebar lists that changes from session to session, for the sake of variety.
More focus on Bitcoin and Nostr, my top interests lately.

I know that I'll be giving up some funtionality (especially in the short term) by moving from WordPress to a static site generator, but I'm confident this blog will be better and more visually appealing overall.

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