Hello, WordPress

This blog has seen quite a lot of technical changes since it first launched in 2006. It first run on WordPress.com, I then migrated it to a homemade Django app, then years later into Gridsome app, and now we’re back to (this time self-hosted) WordPress.

Problem with custom blog engines is that they suck. They’re fine for that “12 minute blog” demo but not too much past that. My Gridsome blog deteriorated in few months to a state where I couldn’t get the development site running at all (and I’m an experienced developer) so I decided that it was time to find something that would allow me to write more. So here we are, again, 16 years later.

Hello, WordPress!

Hello Gridsome!

The publishing frequency of this blog has been somewhat .. irregular to say the least. The previous attempt to bring it to life didn’t quite catch on in the end as a positive problem called life got in the way. But now there’s been just too long break from blogging in English for me so I had to revitalize this project once more. Cue Gridsome.

Gridsome is an interesting static site generator built for Vue. It can read all kinds of data sources from REST APIs to Markdown files and then build the end result as a fully static site that can be deployed very easily pretty much anywhere. I opted for Netlify as I’ve found it super easy and reliable way to host static sites straight from GitLab.

The migration from a fully dynamic Django site to a fully static Vue site was a somewhat interesting experience, I’m planning to write about it in near future. But for now, here’s to yet another awakening of the Hoyci Blog!

Awakenings

This site and this blog is back from a four year vacation! Unfortunately this was not an easy one; I had a pretty bad burnout. Turns out I’m not the only one in the Python and Webdev community either, which is pretty sad. But, I’m back again 🙂

Old site ran on a dedicated server and was built with so old version of Django that I figured out it was easier to start from scratch and rewrite everything with 1.11 and Python 3. So here we are, a little bit rough around the edges, but mostly there. Stories about porting this stuff probably coming up in near future.

I’ve also got two new hobbies during this time: DJing and AI. Well, the first one is a proper hobby, latter is just something I’ve started to follow really closely. So closely in fact, that I decided to put it in the blog description. Some AI-related things to be expected here as well then.

Time to Wake Up

It’s been too long since last entry in this blog. I’ve had lots of good and bad excuses, but I’ve also collected a healthy pile of ideas for future topics, like “how to install Django on Mac OS X with just one command” and “best practices for installing dev environment on Mac OS X Lion”.

Just to get started with installing Django on Mac OS X, it’s as easy as saying sudo easy_install django in the Terminal.app. But there’s more to it. We’ll get to that in another post.

And for the record, this blog was never dead, it just took a three year vacation.

Realign

I’ve just published a new design on this blog. First version was a good start but I think that the new design brings it much closer to what I originally was looking for.

Idea for the big footer is stolen from Jeff Croft, whose site is a great demonstration of what can be accomplished with Django and some imagination. Front page is now a bit different than other pages, and comments had some loving too. The main focus has been on simplicity. And, like always, it’s far from finished.

(A note to IE users: I’m almost certain that something here breaks with your crappy browser. Frankly, I don’t care. After fighting those stupid IE bugs and other historical CSS quirks all day long for client sites, it’s very refreshing to ignore them on a personal site. So no love for your broken browser from here. Not now, not ever. Upgrade to a real browser, get a Mac, or die whining. Thank You. PS. If something breaks with Opera, OmniWeb or some other cool browser, please let me know!)

After the first release at November, there have been quite many upgrades under the hood along the way. Tags can now be viewed in a cloud and individual tag pages have related links (links with same tags) attached. There is an RSS-feed for each tag also. To be 2.0-credible, I integrated my Last.fm data to a local database and pull it to the footer and (at the moment very unstyled) a dedicated music page.

The best is yet to come

This blog has become my personal sandbox for Django development. I’ve experimented with some AJAXy stuff with my own comments app and a basic inline editing proof of concept (a quicktime demo), both of which I hopefully get soon in shape for giving back to community as open source. I’m planning to write up more Django tips in the future to point out some cool but undocumented features that I’ve been playing with lately.

Trying to share data between Finnish and English parts of the site has proven to be a bit tricky. For example the links in the footer may (or may not) look odd if you can’t read Finnish. These kind of things are becoming more important in a world where people from different backgrounds meet on the Web, so I’m sure there will be some i18n topics in this blog in the future.

As always, comments and suggestions are very welcome!

Too Many Blogs

Same Con to Hoyci (aka Too Many Choices) is finally moved under my Unessa.net-domain. Things are a bit rough on the edges (how two-point-zero of me) for now, but I think this is a good start. And yes, it’s running on Django, of course.

Maybe I’ll actually pick up with writing now that I’m no longer dependent on WP.com. I don’t know why, but for some reason I really don’t like writing anywhere where I don’t have complete control over the content. At least I have Big Plans… 🙂

Hello (English-Speaking) World!

Hello folks. I am a twenty-something year old IS (Information Systems) student from Finland. I’ve had this WP.com account since October last year but I really haven’t had anything to say. Recently, however, I’ve found myself playing with new web development frameworks like Django and Code Igniter (well, yes, RoR, too) and I feel that discussing about these kind of things in English might just be the thing for this blog.

In addition to that, it will be fun to write for nobody. I haven’t told anyone about this blog, and I will not promote this in my other (Finnish) blogs. I’ll just sit back and watch what happens. Maybe no one will ever read a single entry I’ve written here, who knows. I don’t really care. I’ll just write for fun!

Speaking of fun, today was my first day with Code Igniter. It’s a very young lightweight web development framework for PHP. After coding a couple of hours with it, I’m definitely going to write some more about it here. Soon.