For a while I've had a growing issue with the version of the static site generator for this site being out of date. It was for example running a super old version of Python 2 (which reminded me of many Python 2 annoyances I'd completely forgotten about) but since the output was all statically generated pages it didn't impact the integrity of the site. Because I had the site building all set up in an isolated VM I could keep publishing changes but updating the software that was doing this was getting harder the longer I left it.

The is perhaps one of the best part of a static site generation approach, despite these dependencies going more and more stale it hasn't impacted the security or the functionality of the deployed site.

However the features I wanted to have support for just weren't there, specifically the older version of Pelican I was using didn't actually have any support for Markdown files for example. As time has gone on I've found myself writing more and more in Markdown and less in reStructured text.

I find I'm using Markdown a lot in Jupyter and I also write many of my posts on other sites directly in Markdown. This over time has led to me starting snippets of posts in Markdown format (for example in GitHub issues) or in various files on my machine. Due to this rise in markdown usage it became more of a hassle not being able to turn these into the stubs or starting points for my posts.

Now I could have used something like Pandoc and then created some tooling to do ths conversion, if this was a work project I'd probably have done something like this. Given however this is a personal site where I write for my own enjoyment that extra friction would have simply led to less writing and less posts. So supporting markdown directly was an easier route for me.

So unlike previous posts here, this post is actually written in markdown rather than reStructuredText.

So now that I've updated the backend the next step will be to get the styling of the site improved. Stay tuned for a post about that.

Edit: The frontend design has been improved now too, see (this post) for details.