Rethinking Arion.Net

Arion.Net has been through a number of changes over the years. My first web site was pretty rudimentary when I put it up in 1996 (!!!). Until recently, I was running Drupal. It served me well for a good ten years. In the early days I would post occasional articles but as time went by it became neglected. I continued to patch and update but last year the final nail was put into Drupal’s coffin. The version I was using went completely out of support. I wasn’t really interested in upgrading and I never really needed the power of Drupal. While I think I did a good job securing Drupal, it’s history of vulnerabilities has been pretty bad and continues to this day. For a replacement, I started looking into static website generators. Since I wasn’t doing a lot with dynamic content (besides some hacks to support my Geek Plates and a dynamic IPv6 badge) generating static content seemed to be the best way to go. Since I know enough Python to be dangerous, I gravitated to the Python based solutions and settled on Pelican. I found a decent theme and started hacking away. I did a good bit of customization to the default templates and found a good way to show my Geek Plates in pure CSS. So far I’m pretty happy with the results but no promises on updating content any more regularly :-)