A new blog

This is a new blog from me.

For years (actually, decades now), I’ve been using NucleusCMS as my blogging system.

Like everything from the early Web 2.0 era, it’s on LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). After years (decades), the PHP part starts to show its issues.

The new versions of PHP start to modernize, and the old PHP code starts to break, all while the project itself has stopped receiving updates. When the system upgraded PHP to 7.3, a few things broke, and I had to find someone’s patch to make it work. Now Debian testing’s PHP has upgrade to 8.0 and things start to break again, and I really no longer have the energy to keep it running, and have to pin the php package on 7.4 while I find alternatives.

Recently the Bear Blog system, and a self-host implementation of it, PolarBearBlog, caught my eyes. So I spent a few days setting it up and running. So viola, here is the first post of it. (Also, thus the new La Vita è Bear title of this blog 😉)

I also made some modifications to it. The most important one is to add Cactus support for comments. Cactus first caught my eyes when I started to use Matrix, the idea of just moderating my blog’s comments sections in my Matrix client sounds so good, but I never bothered to migrate my old NucleusCMS’s comments over (mainly, not wanting to deal with all the headaches of partition). Now with a new blog system, this sounds like the perfect chance to finally try it out for real. (Link to PR)

I’ll eventually write some code to convert my old blogs into static pages for archival purpose, and finally upgrade to PHP 8 (or maybe remove PHP altogether?). This will be my new blog system for the foreseeable future.

Also, polar bears are cool.