Welcome to version 8 of my blog

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.

Imported my Goodreads library to Micro.blog. Now to sit down and go through my want to read page and actually see how many of the books there still warrant a place on the list.

I’ve noticed a trend recently that I’m not using Alexa that often anymore and instead I’m using Siri on my iPad or iPhone. It could be because I have to rely on Siri in the car and it’s gradually spread from there.

Thinking about installing the iPadOS 15 public beta. Normally I wait until the 3rd one but seems to be more stable this year. Also considering installing the macOS 12 beta on my personal Mac since I no longer rely on it for work and I want to play with Shortcuts.

A great second half from England. Finally we beat Germany in a tournament! 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 ⚽️

Disappointing that the Safari Tech Preview doesn’t sync tab groups across my two Macs running the Preview. Would’ve been nice to test that behaviour.

Downloaded Safari Tech Preview for Big Sur. Not sure about some of the hidden UI elements but I’ll give it a chance and see how it changes between now and release day.

Big Mail has arrived. I was really looking forward to it, but the subscription pricing looks like it’s out of reach for me.

A couple of days off to end the week. I’ve a whole week off at the end of June/beginning of July. Can’t wait to leave the Mac for a bit and relax.

Looking forward to WWDC. Definitely some Messages updates in the works judging by the waiting graphics.