Colophon

The fuck is a "colophon"?#

Simply put, a page which explains how this website is made.

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History#

First time I made my own website (as opposed to using a premade platform) I tried several, sometimes exotic CMS. I tried Ghost in its infancy, tried building a Docker architecture with DjangoCMS, and also tried writing my own "website creator script" in Python.

For a while, it was hosted on a Raspberry Pi 3, but I wasn't confortable broadcasting my home's IP address, so I switched to a VPS.

Constraints and motivations#

I like taking care of my website, like some kind of "digital garden". Unfortunately, I'm sometimes away from it for weeks, if not months at a time. So I needed something very, very low maintenance.

I wanted to have a similar control over style and content to handwritten html, but also to be able to simply write text without fighting with raw html when I needed to quickly write something.

I wanted to post pages, text (blog) and images (gallery)

Result#

And so, I ended up with Pelican, writing content in RestructuredText and heavily customizing themes and templates while exploiting obscure RST features.

To handle images, I actually created a Python script to read my old gallery directory and its content and turn it into a bunch of .rst files to start with.

For new images, I usually just copypaste another image's file and modify it.

I have a separate directory delivered by another server block which acts as a sort of CDN. Using a script on my machine, I generate various sizes of the image and send it over SSH to the appropriate directories. This allows me to have the flexibility of a CDN, without having anything running besides the webserver. I just have to change "320/" into "720/" in the url to have another size.