Goodbye, PerlSiikir!

As of a few minutes ago, Kirsle.net is no longer powered by Perl. Instead, I've been working on a new content management system written in Python to replace it.

The reasons for the switch-over are numerous:

1. The old Perl code was originally written for my previous version of my other project, Siikir, and the code was for an entire social networking type of site with lots of features, among which were Blogs, Photo Albums, and Comments (the three that Kirsle.net made use of). Kirsle.net didn't make use of the other features.
2. The Perl code also had some memory leaks, which I tried for a while to eliminate but wasn't making much progress with. It was running as a FastCGI script, and the most notable side effects of the memory leaks were that my web server would randomly kill off unrelated processes, such as Minecraft servers or my XMPP server, because my index.cgi on Kirsle.net was sucking up so much memory. ;)
3. Setting up PerlSiikir on a brand new server was an hours-long task. It needed a recent version of Perl, which needed a perlbrew installation done, and then a lot of modules needed manual installation. Seriously, look at my install notes. The new Python web app takes only minutes to set up.
4. I like Python better nowadays than Perl. :)

And the best news of all is that my new Python CMS is open source!

I named the new project Rophako, because I was sitting at the Github "new repository" screen for a half hour trying to think of a name, and ended up just making use of my Azulian Translator to come up with a name. So, Rophako is Azulian for "Website." I'm a clever genius, I know. ;)

You can check out Rophako on Github: https://github.com/kirsle/rophako. The "default website" that comes with it isn't very polished yet; I literally just finished writing the code to support Kirsle.net. So, sometime later I'll tidy up the default website and have a working copy of it running on some subdomain like rophako.kirsle.net.

Anyway, this is the new CMS. I ported over all my old blog posts, comments, comment subscriptions, and things of the sort. All the old URLs should work too, due to my kirsle_legacy.py module in Rophako. If anybody finds any broken links or issues with the site, let me know. :)

Update (4/9/14):

I've polished up Rophako's default site and have an example running here: http://rophako.kirsle.net/

That's the site you'd get if you download and install Rophako (minus the blog posts and photos ;) ). So... the project is officially in "beta" status now and is usable!