first and ikiwiki
Well here we are, my first homepage, personal website or whatever you wanna call it since I was in high school and vocational school around 2013. Really this post is going to be about the challenges of using ikiwiki more than anything. This is meant to be a "forever website", something I could tweak and change completely without losing the data or having to migrate it to something else. I think the plugin and theming capability of ikiwiki should lend itself to that. Ikiwiki is written in Perl but touts the ability to have its plugins written in any language, so maybe sometime we can take a crack at making one in Raku and I can post about that then.
Another reason I chose it is because of its ability to be a wiki as well as a blog. I thought that if I made another website, I wanted it to be at least somewhat useful and I can put tidbits I learn in the wiki.
Now for the biggest issues I had:
The flashing on Firefox
No matter what I do, the ikistrap theme I'm using is just cursed on Firefox and flashes or blinks whenever you change a page. It kind of reminds me of an e-ink reader updating the screen. I tried to mitigate it as much as possible by applying every optimisation trick I can think of, from preloading CSS files to loading the JavaScript asynchronously, but it only helps so much. The biggest difference came from taking the Bootstrap JS from the<body>, where they recommend to put it and move it to the<head>. I updated the theme to the latest Bootstrap which only needed minor CSS changes and that did little to help. It could be because of the dark theme but I've observed it without it too. At this point I have to throw the ball to Mozilla because the theme is totally fine on Chromium. Which is a bummer as a Librewolf user.Paths
Basically, many of the paths didn't work out of the box and I had to change them to get stuff like the calendar working. For example, on the archives page I had to change the path from ./archives/* to archives/ Also if I wanted the blog at /blog instead of /blog/index, i had to move the index.html from the blog folder to the root folder. (content)Dates wrong with Gitlab CI build
If I had Gitlab CI do the build instead of on my own computer, all the dates on the website updated to when I did the push and not what the file dates are. This is obviously unacceptable because what's even the point of having dates then? So for now I'm building it locally but there's nothing stopping me from writing a .gitlab-ci script that just pushes the website to a public folder in the repo instead of an artifact. Speaking of that, the latest docker image I could find for ikiwiki is one made with Debian stretch 4 years ago, so I'm thinking of making an updated one.
As a final note, I had a dark mode selector from Google here at one point but I plan to implement the Bootstrap way of doing it in the future. Anyway, see ya on the next one. Ciao!