Moving to GitHub pages and Markdown?

The web site of szabgab.com is hosted on my server using some Perl script I wrote ages ago. It does not do much, but it is still a dynamic web app. I write it in some HTML-ish with some meta-data attached that also passes through some pre-processing. Not fun.

I have been thinking, should I move it to some static web site? Should I convert the pages to be written in Markdown and use GitHub pages? Should I maybe switch to GitLab pages?

First I think I should go over the "features" of the web site. I have one page the, books pages which is generated from a YAML file. There is also the archive which is generated. There are "tags" on each page, that I think are currently not in use. The timestamps of the articles are part of the meta-data of each file.

There are layers upon layers of old Perl code. It is fun to see various times of development when I used CGI::Application, PSGI, Moose for various parts of the code. It is also horrific.

GitHub pages are very easy to set up and get started and one could use code in GitHub Actions to use any static site generator. Not only Jekyll.

GitLab pages require a bit more up-front work, but then you are on GitLab.

I just managed to remove a few files that apparently were not in use any more. I hope.

There are also various redirections set up as I changed the system and as I republished pages on the Perl Maven and the Code Maven site.

Markdown would be nice to use, but for now as I went through the code, I don't think I can untangle the site and move it to some static site generator.