Website Revamp in Progress

hiii. I haven't been posting much because I've been unsatisfied with how the website works and I've been contemplating a lot of different options of what to do and landed on keeping the Django backend, but ditching Wagtail as the CMS. Wagtail is built for teams and that adds a lot of complexity I didn't need as a hobbyist with a personal website. Whenever I went to the regular django admin interface to do something I hadn't integrated into Wagtail's admin interface, I found myself drawn to its ugly simplicity and wanting to just run the website from there instead. The Django admin is a CMS, after all.

Of course, as a hobbyist with a personal site, why not just use an SSG? Absolutely fucking not. If there were a "losing markdown files and forgetting they exist" world championship I'd be number one baby!!! Plus there's the fact that I want interactive features like comments and a guestbook without having to rely on third-party services.

I also considered php solutions a bit, there's a lot about php that "just works" on the web compared to other languages. I've installed various php applications before, like my freshRSS instance, and it's stupid simple compared setting up daemons and proxies. But php as a language is inscrutable to me and I find learning it hard because it's not hip and new anymore and a lot of the resources out there are outdated. I'm not confident it my ability to hack and extend a php cms to my needs.

Though if you are someone looking to start a simple website/blog I recommend checking out Chyrp Lite! It's a simple and lightweight php blog that's easy to setup and simple to use compared to something like wordpress.

uh that's about it. the new website will be at the same url and I'm planning on transferring everything over. Hoping to get it done before the end of the year but right now I'm in math finals hell.