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Justin & Meredith Winokur's Kitchen Cooking Notebook

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About KitchenKatalog V2.3.5

/about_kk2.html

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I used to run KitchenKatalog on Wordpress which was great since it offered many advanced tools. Wordpress is one of, if not the, most popular blogging and CMS engines. It has a large community with frequent updates.

However, it is also a large target to hackers. Even when I kept my installation up-to-date, any plugins, etc could open me up to attacks. And it kept happening. I was fed up with the time and annoyance (and sometimes money) of dealing with it.

Finally, I got fed up and decided to write my own static new dynamic site generator. It was clunky but usable. It has however improved as I have moved through three versions of my own software to run it:

  1. Written just for KitchenKatalog. Bad design tradeoffs but it worked. It was hard to maintain though
  2. Written originally for work notes but later generalized for KitchenKatalog. Used some advanced programming which was fun and made it easy (enough) to add features. However, it was slow to compile and could not be compiled incrementally
  3. Current version. About the same speed to compile fully but then can compile incrementally. Also, wrote a web component to allow for online editing. And a custom search engine (which is tuned for the type of things I care about on KitchenKatalog).

There is a downside:

I am now responsible for all design (hence it's ugly for now...) and, while I worked hard on the web components, it is still not particularly pretty

This is a continuous work in progress.

Dynamic Site

Versions 2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 were static site site generators. 2.3 was mostly static but with a dynamic web component. That worked great for this site, but I was using the same software for my notebooks and I got tired of refreshing to get a lot of features (such as links, all pages, etc). So I decided to my 2.3.5! 2.3.5 uses a ton of the work I already did for version 2.3 but is all dynamic. The main pages are still stores as markdown though.

Acknowledgements

I make (and made) extensive use of open source projects in building this site

(And there may be more to follow if I change the design and use some of those frameworks)

Hosting

This site is hosted on WebFaction. It is a recent move but I have been very happy with them. They also host my git repos, etc.