Nikola
Posted on
Those paying attention may have noticed that this site has changed. Up until recently, freshfoo.com was generated using a combination of PyBlosxom and rest2web but it's now using the wonderful Nikola static site generator. The change was prompted by a desire to have more flexibility about freshfoo.com's hosting situation - moving a static site around is far easier than a dynamically generated one. A static site also provides a snappier experience for the end user and there really wasn't a need for the site to be dynamically generated anyway.
Nikola also provides some nice tooling for the site author to help with the writing process. The nikola auto command which serves up the site locally, automatically rebuilding as you work on it and automatically refreshing browser tabs which are viewing the site is especially useful.
The pre-existing articles for the site were written using a combinartion of raw HTML (back from the Blogger days!) and reStructuredText which are both supported by Nikola (as well as Markdown and more), so converting them for use by Nikola required only minor massaging. The URL scheme for posts and articles has changed a little but there are permanent redirects in place to map the old URLs to their new locations. I think the new URL scheme is somewhat cleaner anyway.
The Disqus comments for historic articles have been preserved despite the URL changes for articles. Disqus provides a handy URL Mapper tool to support these situations.
I'm really happy with the result but it's possible that I might have missed something. Please leave a comment below if you see something that isn't right.