Living The Static Life

If you can read this, then this site is now being statically rendered and served from Azure storage (all 8000-odd posts and reference pages in it, spanning around 16 years).

This has been in the works for a while, but I had renewed motivation to set things up to require as little maintenance as possible, so over the past couple of weeks I gradually eased all the bits into place and threw the master switch this morning.

Given the amount of legacy content and my custom media and cache handling, moving this to a “mainstream” static site generator like hugo was pretty much impossible without months of re-formatting, so I did the sensible short-term thing:

• Wrote a quick and dirty 300-line static site generator atop the core engine.
• Got that to write directly to Azure storage using my own library (which is way faster than the standard Azure SDK).
• Got piku to only fire up workers on demand (significantly decreasing the RAM and CPU requirements to host the back-end). Update: Just got it to run cron jobs as well, which makes some things even simpler.
• Set up Cloudflare to do the necessary rewrites where possible (and normalized my URL namespace to lowercase while I was at it).

So the site is now updated via a GitHub web hook (which conveniently provides enough info for re-rendering only what needs to be updated) that kicks off rendering on a tiny VM where I’m also putting some other services.

Eventually, the generator itself will be pared down into a smaller, tighter codebase and go into a GitHub Action or an Azure Function¹ like my sample data pipeline, although I’m still of a mind to do a full rewrite in Clojure (which won’t solve the need to cope with legacy formatting, but will likely be more fun to code).

And no, I didn’t see a need for using Kubernetes here.

There are always compromises, obviously, and I wanted to get this done sooner than later, so these are the salient points for now:

• Archives are temporarily out of commission as I’ve been meaning to re-do them properly for a while.
• Search (a key feature of the original engine, which leveraged SQLite full-text search and was great fun to write) is now handed over to DuckDuckGo.
• Dynamic redirects to “similar” pages (which I relied on to quickly get where I wanted by tweaking the address bar) are now client-side, which is kludgy but works.
• I’ve yet to do proper client-side instrumentation (I’ve got all the usual analytics stuff on, but I’d like to re-visit things like page load times, errors loading assets, etc. to understand if things are broken somewhere I don’t notice offhand).
• I’ll need to tweak caching and HTTP headers a bit. Azure Storage has some nice features for setting blob metadata, content-types, caching attributes and whatnot, and I’m just using the bare minimum for now.

Most importantly, there should be no broken URLs – that is, other than a few legacy hang-ups that I’ve decided to clean up, like the ancient RecentPages RSS feed that harkened back to PHPWiki days.