TITLE: THIS WEBSITE
DATE: 2020-11-19 19:58:44
I probably definitely could have easily installed wordpress or any other thing. But I did not, so here is the story of this website.
When I first started Being Online I used Blogger (Blogger was new), and I learned the then-very-current technologies of HTML4 and CSS2 and JavaScript Before Libraries to make custom templates for it, and I was content. But these newfangled blogging platforms are frankly overwhelming in their various add-ons and monetization tools and overly complex templating languages, if you ask me. It's a lot to learn about a system that is actually mostly about removing your creative control, if you think making websites that do things is about creative control.
SO. I built this myself, the way I want it, in Django, which I like because MVC is a good framework and I know Python better than most other languages.
(A brief aside: Django is really progressing nicely, speaking as someone who last used it when this website last existed, in 2016, and then had the fun of migrating the old code to Django 3.1 when I realized that the world had continued working on its software frameworks in the past four years. A funny thing about coding is how if you just wait a while it usually gets easier.)
Other than that this is not too fancy! I'm using the django-taggit package to do tagging because while Django 3.1's many-to-many implementation seems MUCH less hellish than previous versions I am also lazy. Right now it's a pretty rudimentary blogging platform, plus some discrete apps for the other parts of the site, but the models are all pretty basic. My main focus next is expanding the "stuff" models to, uh, do more stuff, like link to posts like this one and allow me to show version history. You can't get a fun puzzle to solve by redirecting your domain to a Medium!