Welp, I’ve gone and done it. I redid the blog. We’re now Hexo. I wrote some quick and dirty Python (which was neither dirty nor particularly quick, but not too bad) to convert the Canvas posts that were here into whatever format Hexo uses, so when I want to get fancy and re-do this in Jekyll or Hugo, it should be pretty good. But, most importantly, this isn’t running on what was an ass-old version of PHP. Hooray!
The obvious question: why not upgrade Canvas? Well, it got to a point where the version I was using was too old and upgrading it would have been a mess. This happens with Laravel apps. The codebase here was version 6.2 and if you’re not pretty good about updating, you’ll find that it’s just a lot of hoops to go through to bring everything up to speed. On top of that, this site didn’t need a full on web framework. Hexo is a static site builder so all this is just HTML stored on a server.
The other question is: why Hexo? Well, … it was the first thing that looked interesting when I Googled. I tried doing this with Hugo (which has some professional benefit to me - some stuff at the place I work incorporates Hugo) but I had some sort of mental block about it so eh. (Turns out the post format is basically the same so who knows, maybe this’ll be generated by Hugo at some point.)
There are bugs. Search prob doesn’t work and I haven’t gotten around to making list pages or limiting the posts on the front page or anything. Also, I have to set up a CI pipeline for this so it publishes to somewhere. But yay no more actual script processing!