Well, I had started the migration of this site to WhiteNoise, but Perl 6 is currently so slow and buggy, that I've given up. So, I wrote GreyNoise to replace it. After some growing pains (Perl 5 has it's own set of issues) the site is now finally back online (mostly.) Along with a new engine, the site has a completely new theme as well (for the first time in almost 2 years.)
My biggest issues with GreyNoise are all related to Unicode characters. Perl 5 and many of the CPAN libraries have really crappy support for Unicode stuff, which has pretty much screwed up any international characters I used to have in pages. For now I've switched things over to using the non-accepted latin characters. I will eventually figure out a better way, but for now, that will have to do.
Anyway, I have all the original site content pages up, and have fixed stuff like the old diary of a madman and shade so they work properly with the new content engine.
The only stuff that hasn't made the migration from the old site is my short stories, screenplays, etc. The section formerly known as Scrawl is currently unavailable. I am planning to get at least two items back on the site, Scene Seen (my short screenplay) and A Snake in the Garden of Eden (my short story) should surface soon, in a form better integrated with the site.
Any future stories will be done using the capabilities of the new engine from the get-go, so no porting will be necessary (other than converting from LyX to XHTML.)
So, it may have a few bugs, but GreyNoise is here, and the site is now mostly static HTML. However, as it only takes 2.6 seconds to rebuild the entire site, I can change the templates and update the site in only moments. I wish WhiteNoise had been faster, as it is, it would take approximately 3 hours to build the whole site, and unfortunately, WhiteNoise would crash after about 12 minutes of churning. Perl 6 needs to get a lot of optimization before it will be usable for something as ambitious as WhiteNoise. Anyway, I learned a lot while writing GreyNoise, and have lots of changes that will eventually get migrated back to WhiteNoise. In time.
And with that, I say, "til next time". Maybe I'll update this site more often now. Ha! That would be the day.