Same but different - StitchBuddy’s Website

This post will address some technical change behind StitchBuddy’s website - for those who are interested in news from the “machine room“. Be warned, it will contain some serious mumbo jumbo! I apologize in advance to all the others and promise: Next time I will focus on embroidery topics, again…

Until today StitchBuddy’s website was maintained with Realmac’s RapidWeaver, a “static site generator“ which is generating a website from content and layouts, in my case themes from Elixir (Chameleon until 2018, then Ruby). This kind of website generation comes with a couple of major advantages:

• Hosting static sites is simple, with very few requirements regarding web server capabilities and resources
• The attack surface of static sites is minimal, so they are very secure (much different e.g. to Wordpress)
• Content and layouts are decoupled and authors don’t need to know the coding

I was very satisfied with this solution and used it for over 15 years, but unfortunately some developments let me reconsider my vendor lock-in with RapidWeaver:

• First, Realmac moved from perpetual licenses to subscriptions. I can understand their decision from a business perspective, but it’s causing a financial impact for the 3 sites I’m serving with RapidWeaver.
• More important: A new site generator has been introduced by Realmac ("Elements“) which would require a complete rebuilding of all sites. Realmac claims that RapidWeaver Classic will be further developed and updated (article), but using it still feels like riding a dead horse.
• Elixir Graphics provided my website themes, but has closed down with its owner Adam Shiver moving to other business opportunities. This leaves me with a black box of proprietary layouts, which aren’t maintained, anymore.

Long story short, StitchBuddy’s website had to move on! After some research and evaluation I decided to use an open-source site generator “Hugo“ and migrate the current content & design into this solution, which took me about 6 weeks in total: Not the best business case, but another dependency removed and I’m confident this solution is lasting the next years to come.

Although I tried to mimic Elixir’s Ruby design as much as possible, you will notice some differences - to the good and bad. Especially, the nested menu navigation is gone and replaces by some links on product pages for StitchBuddy on macOS resp. iPadOS / iOS.

I reached out to Adam to get his approval for building on his design - so far without any response, but I hope he’s fine with this decision…