---
Title: New school year, new website
Date: 2015-09-03
---

On the eve of the 2015-2016 school year, I decided that my website wasn't representing my work cleanly and clearly enough: strange color choices, busy backgrounds and weak layout. Also, the content had fallen far out of date. Time to do something about it.

### more

Part of the reason is that the old site went the PHP + MySQL route. To update the content for my home-grown scripts, I needed to update database tables manually in my web provider's MySQL administrator page. My blog also depended on a web-based interface. I didn't really like either of them, so I stopped using them.

In the meantime, I've switched very nearly all of my writing over to plaintext-based markup approaches:

- [org-mode](http://orgmode.org/) export to [LaTeX](http://www.latex-project.org/) for papers and presentations;
- [LilyPond](http://lilypond.org/) for music notation;
- [SCDoc](http://doc.sccode.org/Reference/SCDocSyntax.html) for SuperCollider documentation.

WYSIWYG running in a browser was becoming less and less appealing to me.

I had also been hearing recently about *static site generators* as an alternative to maintaining website content in a database. The idea is that plain text files define layouts in templates, content in [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) files, and various configuration files and plug-ins to mash them together into a directory layout of plain HTML files, to drop onto any web server. *That* sounded more congenial. It turned out not to be the utopia I hoped, but I borrowed enough of the concept to hack together a new set of PHP scripts, which read the content from Markdown files. To add a news item, for instance, all I do is write the Markdown and drop the file into the right directory. Simple!

The site is obviously still in progress. When I open new sections, I'll announce them here.