Migrating blog to nikola

After years of being away from my blog / website, I've just this weekend finished migrating it to the Nikola static site generator.

The old site (still running for the moment on https://old.palladion.com) is built atop an ancient version of Zope, using a straight-out-of-the-box CMFDefault layout with a minimal custom main template. It runs behind Apache2, which does some stitching together of static filesystem content.

I've been missing a place to put the little bits of stuff I run across (like the kind soul who pointed me to Nikola!), as well as a way to noodle about code ideas, etc.

Why Nikola? It got a reasonable enough plug from somebody (now lost to memory) that I put the bookmark in my "To Review" folder. Having dug into it, I like the following:

• Makes it easy to keep the source content under version control.

• Supports the markup styles I prefer (ReST, MD, and raw HTML to ease porting some ancient pages).

• Automates both build and deployment, with sensible / lightweight dependency tracking.

• Theming with bare Bootstrap4 is available, and I've stuck with a very vanilla theme.

Porting the old content (a lot of it written in ReST's predecessor syntax, Structured Text) was easier than I though. It turns out the toughest part was writing the Apache2 rewrite rules to handle redirects for old URLs to the new, saner layout!