I started toying around with a little side microblog because I miss being able to open a browser and make a post. I've used Pelican to generate this static site for a couple years now and I think I'm ready to move back to a web publisher.

I wanted to try and revive Anchor CMS, but I don't have the PHP skills to refactor something so large. I'm comfortable in Python, so I'm extending my homepage, which already uses Flask, to have a blog path. There's a lot to do, but it's something I can pick away here and there in the evenings. It's fun to rethink this space every now and then. I think this will be a good move overall.

Well, I did it. I started working on my fork of Anchor CMS to get it up and running with PHP 8. Honestly, most of the work so far has been updating the build system with new versions of the JS packages used to bundle everything up. I haven't needed to do much with the PHP yet.

Anyways, I can set up a new instance from scratch, create the admin user, and write some posts. I've fixed a few CSS errors and I'm going to start working on updating the Sass files because they have some deprecations since they were first written 10 years ago.

The repo is on Github if you want to take a peek.

I've been thinking about moving back to a small CMS for the blog. Specifically becuase I would like to be able to just log into something and write rather than using my current static site flow.

AnchorCMS is an old blog app I've opined about in the past and I decided to take on another project and work on a fork. The maintainers shut down the original codebase back in 2020 and it's been sitting since.

The plan right now is trim down the installation flow and tailor it for myself - it'll be updated for PHP 8 and use SQLite for a database to keep my server running with low overhead.

I have no idea what I'm in for because I haven't touched PHP in a minute. We'll see how it goes.

I've struggled to efficiently grade web dev projects this year. Github Classroom is kind of a pain becuase I need to go to each repo individually and students are struggling with the git workflow. I decided to take that out for now. The next best method is to have them zip project files and then submit the zipped archive that I can extract. It was still a lot of clicking between folders.

Then, I realized (finally) that I can just extract the directories into one parent folder and run Python's built-in HTTP server. It makes clicking around the projects much easier and I can pop open the source tab right in the browser. No more opening and closing files between apps.

I wish I'd thought of this back in September.