Moving from Nikola to...Polymer!?
But…why?
To be honest, I have absolutely no idea.
I had been toying with Polymer, and I loved it. However, it seemed like there was nothing for me to use it on. Then I got the idea: why not move away from my perfectly good, fast, stable static site generator and rewrite the whole site by myself?
Also, I was bored and curious. I dislike "black boxes"; if I don't know how something works, I get frustrated easily.
In addition, where's the fun in not re-inventing the wheel?
The easy parts
Some stuff was pretty easy. For instance, I'm using Prism for syntax highlighting and share-button for sharing stuff. I stuck with Disqus for commenting.
The hard/messy parts (mostly AJAX)
Well, of course there were some...err... complications ...
In particular, notice the index page . The whole thing is automatically-generated. With AJAX.
In the root of the website is posts.json . This contains a list of all the posts. The source code of index.html uses AJAX to fetch the list of posts, then proceeds to again use AJAX (fun stuff) in order to fetch the post.
Now, the fetched post is already in DOM nodes, so I can use normal DOM querying to fetch the div with the id teaser and generate a teaser from it.
The really weird parts
Tags use a similar mechanism of getting the posts via AJAX and querying the site-tags element. However, for some weird as heck reason, on my computer, clicking any link that leads to a totally different page, it'll just take you back to tags.html . Refresing fixes the issue. No clue what the heck is wrong...
The stupid mistakes
So I don't usually do that much web development:
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I consistently blew my brain out trying to figure out why elements weren't showing. Because I changed the opening tag of another element and forgot to change the closing tag. Resulting in it never being closed.
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I code too much Python. Iny my JS code, I tried adding two arrays together with
+... -
Random other stuff. Mostly stuff related to styling/AJAX. JS is not my forte.
Closing thoughts
Normally, I dislike websites that use JavaScript a lot. But I just couldn't resist the idea of trying to do this whole thing without a static site generator. I mean, it mostly works...
Note that, at the moment, the RSS feed still no longer works. Not quite sure what to do about that yet.
Oh, and also:
