Happy new year to everyone who celebrates it at this time of the year! 🎉 While “New year, new me” may not be exactly true, Benung. The Ayeri Language Resource is looking a little different today. This is because, after over 13 years, it was more than due for a thorough overhaul.
I’ve run this site on Wordpress since 2011, however, due to its long running time, more and more clutter accumulated. Also, things I had programmed earlier, for instance, to add glossing, inevitably stopped working from changes I didn’t have the time or didn’t care enough to stay up to date with. On top of that, there’s the recent mudslinging about the popular blogging and content-management platform that bodes ill, as well as bots almost constantly trying to exploit vulnerabilities especially in plugins that I might’ve installed. Time to move on.
After bot traffic increased noticeably in the lead-up and around the US presidential elections in fall 2024 (even for a little hobby site like this one), I’ve had enough. I’ve long thought I should’ve set up the site with a static site generator. It’s now running on Hugo, which seems like a reasonable choice at the moment. Additionally, while NearlyFreeSpeech.net, in my experience, has done a reliable job so far, the static site is now hosted on Codeberg, a non-profit alternative to Github et al. from Germany.
I decided not to copy over everything from the old page verbatim for the moment. Of the 160 blog posts since 2011 I’ve so far focused on transferring the handful I wrote after the publication of the Ayeri grammar book in 2018. Regarding old posts and very old posts, I think it makes sense to keep at least those that contain information on the language that isn’t available elsewhere. Thus, for instance, I’m still undecided whether to bring back the long, essayistic posts that the grammar essentially includes revised versions of.
I hope the fact that all the pages and blog posts are plain text files in Markdown (with some HTML) and that images are mostly bundled with them will save future me some headaches, should another move be necessary. Overall, remodeling the site with Hugo was fun and rewarding because it felt like playing with Lego. Thanks to Leipzig.js, glossed examples are back again as well.
The dictionary has spent most of its digital existence as a (relational) database. Transferring it required a little more effort in order to turn it into a more easily editable JSON file—hopefully not at the expense of data consistency. I wrote an SQL query to return all data as one big table, exported that to CSV, and processed it with a Python script I hacked up in an evening. Tying it into Hugo required writing a template. Making the whole thing searchable had me play around with jQuery, which I’d last looked into about a decade ago. I’ve so far only added basic search. All dictionary entries are also visible by default on a single page now. When transferring the dictionary, I also noticed that some things are definitely out of date and require manual fixing.
My experiment of tying the Wordpress site into the Fediverse never went anywhere much, so I don’t plan on bringing that back for the time being also because it’s harder with a static site.