We are moving.
The official site of MacDown has been a Django project that runs on the Heroku free tier. I liked the solution at the time, but gradually it became clear that it is an overkill to maintain a fully-functional web app as a landing page.
Hosting is also a problem; Heroku offers only 512 MB for free dynos, meaning that the site goes down pretty easily with heavy traffic—which does not happen often (the site currently gets about 700 visitors a day), but it still happened a couple of times. HTTPS is unavailable with custom domain, and the 30-minute auto-sleep feature is also annoying. I’m not saying Heroku is bad—it is an excellent service, just not suitable for this particular use case.
The more I thought about this, it became clearer I really should implement this as a static site. Most of the things are already static, and those that are not can become static with a bit of work. The tipping point came when the always wonderful Armin Ronacher published his home-baked static site generator, Lektor. And so I went to work.
You can see a preview of the new site at https://macdownapp.github.io. It stills lacks some critically parts, and will likely require some time before begin fully ready, but I am confident it will work.
But there’s a catch. Lektor is still in its early stages, and there are some things on Django I can’t replicate on it. Two of these could be very significant for you, reading this post:
macdown.uranusjr.com/blog/feed/atom.xml instead. I added the new route to the current site, so you can do this right now, and everything will work after the migration.macdown.uranusjr.com/blog/feed/atom.xml.Here’s to the migration went smoothly. Hopefully I will see you soon on the new site.