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Blography

· 4 min read
Paul Colby
Paul Colby

Having recently ported this site to Docusaurus, I though it would be interesting (to me, at least) to document some of the history of this site's transitions over the past 17 years!! 😯 So let's go...

Blogger(.com) (2006 ~ 2008)​

Starting in 2006, this site began as a very simple Blogger page, called PC Thoughts. "PC", of course, being my initials (Paul Colby).

Original PC Thoughts header

The very first blog post (ignoring an initial test) was about textRollOverColor in Flex DataGrid (now available on this site here).

First Blogger post

The original Blogger site received six (real) posts in just over two years, before eventually being moved to my own domain (colby.id.au).

Last Blogger post

Drupal (2008 ~ 2013)​

In May 2008, the site was moved to a Drupal instance, running own my own (Debian) server. You can see the originl announcement post here: Ixnay on the oggerBlay.

There are a few snapshots on the Internet Archive, but unfortunately Drupal sites don't render very well there, so the appearance of that version is now lost to my memory (which is not a very reliable source 😉).

Drupal served we well for around five years, with the vast majority of this site's posts so far being first published in this time.

Apache SSI (2013 ~ 2014)​

Eventually, I decided to move away from maintaining my own web server, and switched to static content that could be hosted in S3 with CloudFront. To do this I used Apache SSI, which felt super clean, and clever at the time.

I began exporting the entire site from Drupal to Apache SSI in 2013-01-16, and went live around 24 days later (2013-02-01), which is pretty good considering I needed to develop a comprehensive SSI framework to cover posts and the various layout and style templates from scratch, by hand.

Apache SSI version

Info

The (completely hand-crafted) styling was largely inspired by the YUI Library.

The SSI approach didn't last very long though (despite its elegance), as more sophisticated options became available.

Jekyll (2014 ~ 2023)​

Inspired by GitHub Pages's use of Jekyll to generate static websites from GitHub repositories the start of 2014 began porting from Apache SSI to Jekyll.

The port began on 2014-01-11, and around 24 days (2014-01-25), which coincidentally, was the same duration (approximately) as the Drupal-to-Apache SSI port.

Jekyll version

The Jekyll port remained in use for almost 9 years, but in that time only one new blog post was added, This was mostly because major life events happened (children, major work projects, etc). By the time I'd recovered 😅 the Jekyll site felt very old and out-dated (particular in my theme / styling, not so much Jekyll itself - lots of stuff was hand-crafted, and I'm no web designer!), and so the site continued to languish for quite some time.

Docusaurus (2023+)​

Finally (for this post), I began using Docusaurus in late 2023, to create a developer portal at work. I was quite impressed with how well Docusaurus solves most common use case with ease. Then, seeing how Docusaurs has built-in Blog support I considered it might be much easier for me to maintain this site (and add new content) going forward, if I ported to Docusaurus.

So I began some initial experiments on 2023-12-22, and four days later (with all of the Christmas hosting and activities included) I had ported all the Jekyll content and went live with the Docusaurus version! Most of the work of those four days were porting the old blog posts from using lots of HTML (as exported from the original Drupal site where that content was created) to MDX. This wasn't stictly necessary, since MDX does support HTML, but Docusaurus is less tolerant (a good thing™️) of poorly formed HTNL, and so most posts at least needed some minor fixes, in which case I found it easier (and more rewarding) to just reformat all content to MDX.

Docusaurus version

As a bonus, I was able to easily add a bunch of old recipes to the documentaion site of this Docusaurus site (more on that later), which is something I'd wanted to do previously with Jekyll, but would have been much more cumbersome.

Hopefully, with this site now live with Docusaurus, I'll be able to get back to adding the (very) occassionaly blog post. I already have several posts in mind...