A New Version of the site for 2020

After 10 years of neglect, it is time for a new start of this site, because:

• I am going to retire in early 2021 (in 6 months), and I will have now time to properly maintain a personal site
• I am feeling the need to archive in a central place all the contents I scatter in various different places, if only for the selfish reason to be able to retreive them more easily
• I was toying with the idea of going to a static web site, as it is now in vogue, and it has a kind of nostalgia for me as I started my web sites as static sites anyways. But by looking at the existing solutions, I was not convinced by them, as a lot seemed to naively solve the 80% easy part of the problem, and them struggle without any clear vision on how to solve the 20% hard part... a classic situation.

I thus decided to keep on using Foswiki (v2.1.6), as it is now quite mature, and thus stable: I like building on solid, time-tested fundations that will not change every month. And let's be honest, it is both extremely powerful and incredibly reliable. I am just tweaking it for using it as a public site (one author with all admin rights, and read-only viewers), rather than the standard wiki setup of many authors, all able to edit contents, with some able to also admin rights. My postulate is that a dynamic web site like a wiki, with proper caching, has all the advantages of a static web site, but is more practical to maintain (although more complex to implement).

I will detail my views on how to website-ize a wiki in future posts, but for now, on 2020-07-26 at noon French time, let go live!

Welcome to my (new) world!

Colas.