Roller

After almost ten years of using Apache Roller to power this blog, I'm making the leap to the Hugo static site generator. Roller served me well, but after years of watching Roller+Tomcat use hundreds of megabytes of memory on my server, I decided that it was overkill for my needs.¹ The only major feature which absolutely demands dynamically generated pages is the comments, and I've migrated that functionally to a distinct service using Isso.

When I decided to start this blog, I installed the Roller 4.0 weblog software. Many different blogs can run in one instance of Roller, and the URLs for the blogs are arranged as subdirectories of a master Roller URL. For instance, if you installed Roller to be /roller, then your blogs might have URLs like /roller/my_blog, /roller/potato_farming_in_pocatello, and /roller/i_like_lettuce. That's fine for many uses, but I prefer to have more concise URLs. I'd like my blog to be referenced from the root of the web site, like /my_blog. Why should I have to conform to how Roller thinks I should set up my web site?