Welcome to version 8 of my blog

Saturday, July 3, 2021

As the title says, welcome to the eighth official version of my blog. This one has been a while in the making. It started as a new theme on Wordpress over a year ago, included a short holiday on Ghost before ending up being powered by Jekyll. That makes this the first version of my blog not to be powered by Wordpress and in all honesty it’s a refreshing change.

Since I’m using a new engine to power things, I’ve decided to take a bit of an iterative approach. What you see here is what I would call the Earliest Testable Product (ETP). It has all the basics I would like to include on my blog, a home page, an about page, an archive page, and the blog posts themselves. My intention is to gradually add features over the coming months, improve the design of some elements, and ultimately add a place to display some portfolio pieces.

The biggest decision about this new version of my blog was the move away from Wordpress. The CMS has powered this site since the very beginning, but recent versions have made me start to question how suitable it is for a site such as this. Wordpress has begun to feel quite heavy and complicated with lots of new features being added that I had no interest in. I began to crave a simpler way of doing things. Something flexible that didn’t require my Mac for me to work on so that I can do things from my iPad as well. It’s the ability to develop from my iPad is a big part of the decision. It has become my go to device away from work and the one which I do most of my writing on so being able to develop the blog from iPad became a big factor in picking the new engine.

In the next few weeks I plan to put together a roadmap to work through for both features and design improvements, at least until I get the key things implemented. In the mean time, if you see anything that seems out of place or broken, drop me an email.