This morning I found out that it's world elephant day. It's one of those facts which has stuck in my mind ever since for the simple fact that elephants are my favourite animals.

My parents tell the story of when I was small and we went to zoo together for the first time. There was one animal I wanted to see, the elephants, but for little me they were terrifying. I had only ever seen pictures of elephants in books, where the scale of the images didn't communicate to me how big the creatures are in reality. When you're a small child and see a picture of an elephant on one page and a duck on the next, the two appear the same size. So when I saw the sheer size of the creatures, I burst into tears.

I don't remember the day, but it makes me want to go back and reassure my small self that it's ok, elephants are still awesome.

Over the last couple of years I've struggled with my mental health. It's the second serious bout of depression that I've had in the last 8 years. This time, I've found elephants oddly comforting.

My Mum and my Aunt have often sent me small videos of elephants in that time and never once have they failed to bring a smile to my face. Baby elephants are funny. They do daft things and they have fun little personalities. Who can't help but laugh at the elephant that kicks it's trainer in the bum while standing next to him? They are like naughty teenagers.

There's another side to elephants which I've really come to appreciate in the last couple of years. The caring, nurturing side of the adults. I'm sure other animals exhibit these characteristics to their young, but something about the way the elephants express it is very comforting. Perhaps it's their size, and the strength and power they display, that makes it more surprising when you see a mum curl her trunk around her baby and pick it up from the ground. There's a gentleness from these animals that you wouldn't expect. At a time when the world seems more broken than it ever has, there's something oddly comforting in seeing a large creature display such gentle and caring behaviours towards others of it's kind.

I don't really know where this post is going, or really what the point of it is, other than that I wanted to write something today. So here it is. Make of it what you will.

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.