This blog is built a static web site, powered and managed by the excellent Nikola static web site generator.

The motivation for using a static blog was to make writing articles more straightforward for our developers, without introducing unnecessary media breaks and barriers. Using this framework, one can contribute content using familiar tools and workflows.

When we initially created this blog in September 2015, we used Mercurial for managing the source files and assets and hosted the repository on an internal Mercurial host.

This has now been changed - we moved the source code repository to BitBucket, as part of the openATTIC umbrella project.

We also converted the repository from Mercurial to git along the way, primarily as an exercise to evaluate how easy such a conversation can be performed, but also as a first step to give us a way to practice our git skills and to further open up our development processes.

The conversion was performed on a local development system using the hg-fast-export Python script and was quite simple, following the steps outlined in the README.md file:

$ mkdir openatticblog.git
$ cd openatticblog.git
$ git init
$ ../fast-export/hg-fast-export.py -r ../openatticblog.hg

Afterwards, the git repo could easily be pushed to BitBucket.

BTW, if you take a closer look at this repo, you will notice there's a branch named website. This is a work in progress project to convert the existing openattic.org web site from Typo3 to Nikola.

While the content is shaping up nicely, the layout and design still needs some more attention before we will make the switch. If you're familiar with creating web sites using Nikola and Bootstrap and want to give us a hand, please let us know!

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