Preparation for deploy, final thoughts

Simple enough, yet highly functional

The goal for this website is simple. A place to collect my thoughts, write blog posts, or show off my projects. I wanted something fast, and simple to work with. While entirely doable, this did not feel like I need to set out and use a big framework, or design my own dynamic solution. Though at the same time, designing and maintaining a static website with more than a handful of pages is not easy. Something I began to see evidence of with the original content on my GitHub pages site. Keeping these basic criteria in mind, I began trialing a couple different solutions.

Nikola was the first one I tried out. Seemed to tick all the boxes for me, has a great amount of community, and a nice amount of documentation. However, initially something just felt a bit off. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the work flow, and determining exactly how I should create my project. Very quickly things felt too complex and like my original vision was being lost. Not good at all!

When suddenly — a Pelican caught my eye. Felt like a much simpler and nicer to use version of Nikola. I really liked this one right out of the gate. It felt fast enough. The output looked ideal for what I envisioned. And I even began to see everything coming together — finally! Yet those same feelings of complexity, and loss of vision began creeping back in. What’s going on here? I don’t normally jump around like this after I get it in my mind.

Honestly, I think a big part of that just boils down to the new work flow. I’m not used to this at all. Previous projects could live happily on forever, in a single Git repository. Never caring where they were, or who else was around. This new setup.. While it could be that easy. I’m not sure I want it to be. Just need to find some way to complicate things over here. There is a basic organizational structure (not quite yet) in place which should maintain a more full separation of code, design and content at the Git level. More on that later.

Nikola: misunderstood, genius, innovator

And so I found myself nearly right back at the beginning. Firing up a fresh project with Nikola, and slowly building my structure back up. This has taken a very iterative approach thus far. Treating this as one big brainstorm session in a way, and finding myself very happy with the results. Granted it did not all come so easily. All these different ideas, different work flows, and new ways of going about things is going to take some time. But we’ve (finally!) got a workable base that we can build up on.

One of the more challenging bits for me has been deciding upon a directory hierarchy to keep the content organized. A solid directory structure helps users to navigate the site better. For me, human-readable URLS that make sense are important, so I made several tweaks into the configuration to facilitate that. This includes storing blog posts under the posts/<Year>/<Month>/ directory tree. As well as separating the tags, and categories pages into separate destinations.

The sum of these changes leaving us with customized, and configured copy of Nikola that should fit our needs wonderful for now. This is certain to change in time. For now, I think it’s really nice considering I have yet to do any real theme work. That will be coming. I’ve got a few ideas floating around for that.

git add hopes_dreams && git commit

The moment of truth is nearly upon us! I wanted to write out this post, as well as leave myself some time to double, and triple check the output contents. There are several items that should not be published. Nothing too good. Just a few test posts that wouldn’t otherwise make sense, images that are potentially licensed, and the Nikola demo content installed by nikola init --demo.

It’s also now a good time to really think hard about how we version control this project and related pieces. Due to the licensed, and demo content that was committed during the initial test phases of this website, I want to break it up. If nothing else, that will mean deleting the .git folder in my development copy of this website and re-initializing it without a history. However, I think a solution I like better will be to keep things separate.

Using a series of symlinks, I would like to use maintain separate repositories for the custom theme being created, the Nikola project base, and the content. I can foresee some areas that will need attention. Such as, do we commit pages/ or output/? How can we deploy to GitHub pages if the destination repo is not the one we are currently inside? Is that even possible? For now though, we’ve got something good to work off of. I have no problem to manually deploy our content to our GitHub Pages repo.

For now, I’m just gonna keep at it, and have fun. I’ll never have things 100% right from the start. The best things take time, and this is no different.