My orginal site was written in HTML by hand, which meant that every time I wanted to add a page I would have to write it out and then link it up by editing all the relevant pages so that the website worked well. This was fine for just a couple pages, but then I started adding a gallery and more articles which made it more difficult. This friction made me not post very often to the site and thus left it mostly unused. I then made the switch to wordpress with a rather janky template that I had made based off my old website design. It looked similar to the original site but with the wordpress additions. some these were helpful, like the ease of uploading and editing pages. But some didn't work as well as I had wanted, mainly the photo gallery was a bit annoying to do and loaded slowly.

So during the semester break I had some free time to rewrite the website. This time I went back to writing HTML but I created some python scripts to aid in creating articles and updating the gallery. sure, now I have to write the projects in a text editor instead of a fancy wysiwyg gui; besides I think its not much of a downgrade as all I did was add images and sometimes a bit of code, both of which are easy enough to do with HTML tags.

I've created two python scripts, one to add articles to the projects page and another to add images to the photo gallery. The project one was quite straight forward, it needs to take the 'projects' directory, read all the dated folders and link the main.html file to the projects page. It also needed to extract some metadata from the file and add that (stuff like the name, date and a brief description) and add that to the projects page.

Those two scripts are basically enough to run the whole website as thats all I use it for. I run caddy in a docker container so updating the site is as easy as running one or both of the scripts and then simply running docker compose up to copy the files into the active site instance. I decided on caddy as my web server software for the ease of setup while using a reverse proxy, which I need for my nextcloud instance (also a docker container).

All in all I'm pretty pleased with how the site looks and how it functions. It's fast, easy to maintain and the backend isn't a dumpster fire.

- Austin Jensen