Big changes behind the scenes here at nedbatchelder.com, but only a small change for you.

My hosting provider was being acquired, and they said they would migrate my site to the new host. Then they wrote last month to say they couldn’t migrate it (no word why), and that I had six weeks to find a new home.

I briefly tried to just move the site as it was, but PHP 5 was in the mix. Rather than learn how to move it to PHP 7, I bit the bullet and converted it to a real Django-served site.

For 13 years this site has been built with Django, but served as static HTML pages. The comments were handled by PHP code. As part of this move, the site is now served directly by Django on the host, with Django-implemented comments.

This should all be invisible to readers of the site, except for one thing: comments are now written as Markdown instead of as neutered HTML. Having a Django foundation means I will be able to make changes more easily in the future.

Behind the scenes, there is still plenty of strange tech: content is in XML, loaded into a SQLite database locally, then rsync’ed to the server.

Some dormant areas of the site aren’t serving properly yet, but the important stuff works. If you see a problem, please let me know.