About KitchenKatalog

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I used to run KitchenKatalog on a self-hosted 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 tired of it 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 as pages updated

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).

3.1) Based on the dynamic part of version 3, this is instead default dynamic. Content is updated as soon as the source file is updated (and the page is viewed). Has some edge cases, but works pretty well. Also has the option for static export, though it is not incremental.

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

Dynamic Site

Versions 1, 2 and 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

(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.