Hey everyone,

Well, it’s lasted 15 years, but my old website has run out of gas. Specifically, it was created using Python 2, and that’s going to be unsupported at the end of 2019, so time to re-write in Python 3.

Gone are Apache and mod_wsgi; it’s now running on nginx and uwsgi. The hardest part was choosing a CSS framework, and I tried a lot of them before settling on Materialize (https://materializecss.com/). It’s light, easy to use, and responsive.

Under the hood I’ve replaced how archived email messages are stored and processed. Before it was MariaDB using its fulltext index; now everything is stored in Elasticsearch, where full text searching is native. I’ve run a lot of tests, and queries take about 1/10 the time as before.

Of course, there may be glitches, and I’d like to know about them if you find them. I’ve also tried to keep the URLs the same, but some are not. One example is the archive search:

Before: https://leafe.com/archives/search/<listname> After: https://leafe.com/archives

My old web framework (Pylons) made it difficult to combine the lists into a single form, but the new framework (Flask) makes things much simpler. I’ve added a redirect for some of the old URLs, but not all, so if there are any that are causing you pain, let me know.

The new site should be available as soon as the DNS update propagates through the inter webs.

-- Ed Leafe