[NOTICE] Site Is Moving, and Things Will Break


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:

  1. Atom subscription URL will change. You need to change the URL to 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.
  2. RSS 2.0.1rev2 subscription will be dropped. If you’re subscribed to the RSS feed, you will need to switch to Atom at macdown.uranusjr.com/blog/feed/atom.xml.

Here’s to the migration went smoothly. Hopefully I will see you soon on the new site.