It's me!

Welcome to the newest iteration of my corner of the web. I took some time (ok, a lot of time) to slow down and figure out what I really wanted out of this site, and I think I’ve come up with something that I really enjoy. I experimented with the photo-a-day blog, tried including a personal resumé, and even spent a large span of time sorting every post (almost 250) within tags & categories. It was an interesting journey, but I think I’ve finally discovered the some of the roadblocks to my personal blogging efforts.

Ultimately, it was too complicated. Sure, WordPress makes the actual publishing side of things seem easy. It’s all a facade. Think about it. Pick a topic. Write a post. Chose a category. Assign some tags. Publish. It’s not a lot, but it’s a roadblock.

The second, and arguably more subtle roadblock I found, had to do with my job. I spend my days split between code that I really enjoy, and WordPress for client sites. It’s great for their sites and needs, and it’s a powerful resource for the price, but it’s not code that I enjoy writing. When I have spare time, it’s much more enticing to sit down in code I enjoy than to open up the WordPress dashboard and pen a post. Again, subtle, but it’s a roadblock.

The solution

After hearing about Mark Otto and his foray into using Jekyll, I was intrigued. A blogging medium build around the code that I enjoy. Posts written in markdown, and published with a simple git push to GitHub Pages. No hosting to manage, no complicated system to publish. Just content.

It has it’s drawbacks. When I decided to take the leap, I figured a redesign made sense as well. I quickly learned that Jekyll is currently a little limited in its pagination functionality, but there is an active community behind that, so I don’t doubt that will be addressed soon. It also reduces your ability to blog from any location easily. You know, because being able to post from my phone kept be blogging consistently.

So I took the dive. I put together a new design and slimmed down the details until I was left with just the basics. The site you’re now reading is powered by Jekyll and hosted on GitHub (really, here’s the code), and, get this, I really enjoy working with it. Will this make me post more? It certainly won’t hurt.

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