Importing articles from an earlier blog

2024-05-08 09:55 WIB - Hendrik Lie

We already have an older blog called Static Blog Alpha. It was currently accessible using two methods:

Through our current rerouter page.
Through this manifest file, you just need to select xenostation and click on preview button.

However due to its nature as a static website, updating it was a hassle. Not only that we need to pay for its storage, we also have to have access to the wallet that created it. Also the nature of the permaweb makes the link is, uh, for the lack of a better word, intimidating.

It was done long ago when I barely had any knowledge about web development. And to be frank, I am also not proud on how I did things in that page. The page is simple in design, with the aim to make it very easy for me to generate the page using a markdown template, and using pandoc defaults file and metadata file. Then all I have to do is just to upload the file to the permaweb.

However the design constraint comes at a cost: updating the layout would mean I have to reupload some of the files there. It was also being optimized over time using javascripts, but the solution is far from elegant. As recent as now, we already have it able to use javascript to fetch snippets and add them to the site using javascript DOM. Therefore if I need to update the styling, I would only have to update a few set of files, and I don’t have to reupload every articles to update the style consistently.

Again, due to the nature of permaweb, bookmarking any page of it indeed pin you to that specific point in time. You would not be able to accest the latest version if the page is updated in any way. Basically you will have multiple versions of the website available since the first time it was launched, and the most reliable method to get the latest version is through the second method of accessing it.

It is far from ideal, and the need of it is pretty much obsolete since I already have this website. Even though this website is not permanent, and it is not static (the content is dynamically generated), it is much easier to develop and update, and it is also planned to be a single source of truth. So why don’t we repurpose some of articles in that Static Blog Alpha here? It would not be all, but a select few should be sufficient.

I will not preserve the publication date, but I will have to put a note somewhere along the page that says the following:

This page is originally written for and is published on Static Blog Alpha at (original publication date). You can access the original version here (pointed to the permalink).