Blazing updates
As expected, the updates to this page has not been overwhelming. In fact, I’ve touched neither the code nor the content the last 4 years. That is about what I expected though, and honestly just par for the course.
That said, it’s not as though nothing has changed. I’ve both diversified and consolidated: I’ve moved all content related to The Longest Journey and Dreamfall to it’s own domain. I used to host this in a separate droplet, but the trafic and use couldn’t justify it so I’ve now just implemented a virtual host and have both domains served from the same droplet.
Something I hadn’t accounted for, though, is that sometime between me moving it over and checking that everything was working and a few weeks ago, the transcript silently went down. This is, to be frank, less than ideal as I want mine to be a high availability and persistant resourse, something which cannot be said for most of the resources we’ve had through the years.
The reason for the issue is quite plain: at some point Python was updated to a new major version, and this broke the virtual environment I was using to run Django. I’m sure that there are ways to avoid the posibility of that happning, but since I’m running so many different frameworks I don’t have the specialized knowledge for an optimal setup. And since I hadn’t implemented proper monitoring, the site just went down. I don’t know for how long.
I do however have a solution for this. It’s a new framework. – No, don’t leave. Hear me out here.
The content on that page - and this page, for that matter - is updated so infrequently and by so few that I do not need dynamic content generation. In the (far) past, the only other choice from some kind of dynamic page would have hand typed static HTML. Which is a pain. (I know, I’ve done it). This is no longer the case though. There are now a number of static page generators, like Hugo. This is perfect for the purpose. It should be relatively easy to set up the pages, and yet serving them will be very low weight.
In fact, I’ve already started a project with a new design and implemented page generation in Hugo. I did that years ago, it shouldn’t be too much work to switch things over now. There’s just this one tiny problem. I’ve, uh, misplaced that code. I know I’ve added it to a source code manager somewhere - I always do that. It’s just … where?
Hopefully, I will figure it out. And once I do, hopefully the availability monitoring I already have in place will then be sufficient to let me know if the page breaks again.