<p>Good programmers are supposed to be lazy, right? The way I interpret this statement - because none of the software engineers who I know could be considered lazy - is that we like to automate repetitive tasks. You know, tasks like checking if you’ve made any changes to your blog and then building the blog and deploying the changes automatically. Which is what I’ve done, and in this post I’ll show you my minimalist setup to do so.</p>
<p>Right, if you and your RSS reader can read this, the first stage of the migration of my blog to a static site has successfully completed and you’re now reading the new site. There’s still some more tweaking to do, but I broke it up into multiple milestones to minimise the overall risk of the migration.</p>
<p>One “biggie” that was holding up this blog’s migration to a static site was getting a comments system up and running, followed by importing the existing comments. I had picked <a href="https://posativ.org/isso/docs/">Isso</a> a while back as it allows for easy import of existing comments from WordPress. I really didn’t want to depend on a third party comment hosting service like Disqus. I also didn’t want to use Staticman, mainly because it has dependencies on…
<p>Now that I’ve got the static site up and running, it’s obviously time to switch over immediately, right? Not to fast. After QA’ing my deployment process in production, it was time to check how the two compared from a performance perspective. I like to use several different tests, starting with <a href="https://tools.pingdom.com/">Pingdom</a>, then using <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/">PageSpeed Insights</a> for more details.</p>
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I have been toying with the idea of migrating this blog to a static site to simplify its maintenance for some time. While <a href="https://wordpress.org">WordPress</a> is a great tool, this blog is a side project and any time I have to spend maintaining WordPress gets deducted from the time I have to write for the blog. Keep in mind that I'm self-hosting this blog and it's actually running on a Linux VM that only handles the blog. This is yet another server that I need to administer,…