Site Relaunch

It's been quite a while since an update. I had just left Charlotte bound for the West Coast. I ultimately didn't make it to San Fransisco. I will make a blog post soon about all that happend for the rest of the trip.

But for now I've finished up my adventures in America. I've been in the UK for two months. There were no blog posts for a few reasons.

1. It turned out to be very difficult to update while driving alone cross-country. At the end of each day, I was very tired. Also I spent quite a few nights driving till late and then I would park in a rest stop for the night. No chance to get the laptop out on those days.

2. My wordpress install broke. An autoupdate broke the plugin and theme I was using to power the comic part of this website.

Number 2 could have been a rather quick fix, but I'd already been getting a bit fed up with wordpress anyway. So I started looking at alternatives. I'm familiar with the python programming language so I was looking for python alternatives.

I started with Django and looking at the various cms' built on that. Mezzanine seemed large and bloated but the best choice, especially as it had the best Python 3 support. But before I'd gotten very far into that, I chanced across a new movement that is sweeping the blogs of technically minded bloggers. Static site generators.

Static site generators take your content, articles, pages etc. and convert it straight into html. No php, no database to worry about, nothing dynamic that is generated server side. This leads to fast, secure websites that can be hosted almost anywhere. I've even moved this website to github, which allows hosting of static websites. This is free and faster than my old hosting.

There are many static site generators out there, written in almost any language you can think of. Github even has one built in written in ruby. But as I'm familiar with python I looked into python versions. Settling on pelican, as it has the largest community behind it.

It's been a great, if slow learning experience. Through porting my website over I've been relearning how to code, something I haven't done in a while. I'm now officially an open source contributor, having coded up three plugins and altering a fourth to get all the functionality I had with wordpress.

So the website is back. Expect more travel posts. But more importantly, expect more comics as well. The site will still be going through some cosmetic changes over the next few weeks. I've been brushing up on my css skills and learning all the new html5 stuff. This may lead to a junior web design job, or some freelance work. Something I can do on the road if I need to so I can start travelling again. It would be great to land some acting work but if I don't this would be something versatile and creative, and let me live a digital nomad lifestyle.