Home

Search Posts:

Archives

Login

January 2014

S M T W H F S
1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18
19 20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31

I'm going to stop putting content on this site, and I'm going to convert what exists to static HTML so the archives remain available. I intend to do this in the next month or so. If I have something in place to replace this site, I'll make a final post here linking to it.

The executive summary is that 1) the reasons for this are mostly technical and 2) I plan to bring something like this back somewhere else at some point. For boring details, read below:

---

I wrote this web site using Ruby on Rails some years ago. One of my goals when I did this was to have a place at which I could publish stuff that I wrote. Another goal, though, was to learn how to make a dynamic web site.

Well, I suppose you could say I was successful in both goals. I learned how to use Ruby on Rails. I wrote words.

Rails gives you a lot for "free," so making a thing like this isn't some impressive accomplishment, but it was an important thing for me to learn and understand at the time. I already knew ruby, and Rails seemed like a useful technology to be exposed to. Indeed the little hobby project was very helpful to me in understanding how dynamic web sites work.

Well, time moves on. I really favor python and django these days, and have little interest in Rails. So this site is running the same obsolete version of rails from ages ago, which has all sorts of scary sounding security vulnerabilities, but I cannot update it automatically because that would require me to rewrite my own code.

In addition to that, the virtual machine on which this site resides is running CentOS 5, and I'd really like to update that. The biggest reason I have not yet done so is that I know replicating old Rails environments can be troubling (as I learned upgrading from 4 to 5). So this is the "end of the line," basically. Something must give.

So here I have it: this site uses an old version of a web framework I no longer have interest in, which is no longer supported and is purportedly horribly insecure. My options then are to either dive back into Rails and update my code to work with modern versions, migrate to something completely different like Django or an off the shelf blogging platform, or just forget about it completely.

So, near term, I'm going to switch everything to static and add rewrites to make everything remain available while I figure out where I'll go next. Longer term, I'm not really sure. Perhaps I will switch to hosted wordpress which is robust and brain-dead - great if you just want to write content, not code. Or perhaps I will make something new. But I will certainly keep writing things somewhere.

Comments

hebergement web maroc @ Sun Dec 01 18:35:24 -0500 2013

thank you for this interesting article !

New Comment

Author (required)

Email (required)

Url

Spam validation (required)
Enter the sum of 7 and 6:

Body (required)

Comments |Back