Hello, world!

The site

In case you missed the footer, this is using Nikola. I wanted something lightweight and fast, so I was gonna go with Hugo, but I find Go's text/template rather annoying to work with. So I tried out Pelican briefly, but apparently it doesn't do incremental compilation very well, and that is important to me. Next I looked at Nikola and I quite like it! It does support incremental compilation (although it's kinda slow to start up, so that may not pay off for a while) and it uses Jinja which I quite adore <3

The comments

Getting comments on here was quite a journey. I wanted something that federated over ActivityPub, so I first tried Pinka but I couldn't get it to federate properly. So then I tried Leah's Mastodon-API fetching script along with GoToSocial and a read-only API key. Turns out there's a bug in that script which doesn't allow top level comments from other servers. At this point I was running out of options, so I ended up just going with Isso, which is an old Python project that just does local comments and nothing else. I really wanted federation though, but I figure this is even lower friction because it doesn't require an account.