Webtoo Websight has been my custom website engine for 10 years. By the end of this month, it will be no more. Read more to find out what will happen to this site shortly.
I have already moved jargon to it's own domain name, and it's powered by a completely new engine written specifically for it. That engine is written in Perl 5, and is a very fast, dynamic engine. However, it was written specifically for jargon, and isn't optimal for the rest of huri.net.
So, what about ww6? Well, the biggest problem is, Perl 6 is not ready to power dynamic websites. Sorry, but that's the truth. It is brutally slow, even with SCGI, and takes more resources than the virtual server powering this site can handle. I had considered re-working ww6 to generate static sites, but it just wasn't written in a way to accomodate that sort of usage. It would probably require a complete rewrite, in which case, why bother to use it?
So what then? Write a new engine in Perl 5 specifically for this site? I had considered it. Then I thought of all the work I'd put into ww6. It occurred to me that a lot of the work was writing the pre-requisites. Things like Exemel, Flower, and Temporal Utils. Along with great libraries like JSON and Perl6 File Tools, I had the tools available to build an engine specifically for huri.net.
So, WhiteNoise is coming. It's based on Webtoo Websight in how it's data is stored. It has pages, templates, etc. It uses the same page and template format as ww6. It uses XML+TAL for templates and JSON for configuration and metadata.
Best of all? It generates static websites. So I don't care how slow Perl 6 might be, or how much RAM it takes up. It doesn't matter. I don't have to worry about all the custom code that ww5 and ww6 have to manage URLs, to parse URLs and query strings. All that is gone. The web server itself handles the URLs now. Everything is a pile of HTML files, served statically. WhiteNoise is only used to (re-)generate the pages.
WhiteNoise is not quite ready for deployment yet, and even when it is, I will need to migrate all of the site content from ww5 to WhiteNoise, which should prove to be an interesting task. A quick migration script should help.
One thing that will prove slightly shocking upon migration, is that the Shade and Scrawl sections will no longer exist. Instead, the contents currently found on them, will be integrated into the main site. I will write a script to convert LyX documents into WhiteNoise pages, so instead of the lyx2html script (which generates non-XML output) I will be able to directly output stories into the website. A link to PDF versions if available will be on each story's table of contents.
The other big difference is, the categories are going away. Instead of grouping articles into a single category, I'm moving to a tag-based system instead, where articles can be tagged with specific keywords, and you can get a list of all articles and/or stories tagged with those keywords.
So yeah, there is a huge change coming soon, be on the lookout for it.