Redesigned Again
Over the course of the last several months, I’ve been busy building out my website utilizing Jekyll instead of Wordpress. It’s not my first time moving away from Wordpress, but I think it will end up being permanent.
I do want to write more and I do hope to do so soon, but the fact of the matter is that in all honesty, I really don't blog as much as I want. This lack of posts has the distinct advantage of trying in with what was the biggest difference to me between Jekyll and WordPress. Jekyll does not use or require a database.
Instead, it uses files to identify the individual pages and posts. Want to add a new post? Just add a file to the posts folder with a given filename format. Jekyll is part of a new trend with static website generators and I have to say that for my current needs, this works out perfectly.
Because Jekyll just uses files to handle the posts, it makes backing up much simpler. Hell, I can just keep everything in a Git repository and I'm good to go...which is exactly what I do.
As for the design, I decided I wanted something a little more simple. I do love the cover images, but decided that want really what I wanted for the new look. I decided I liked the idea of a short summary about myself in a sidebar with the main content in the main section. It's simple, and in my humble opinion, elegant. I didn't want to get rid of images completely and I wanted to keep something there to continue the "feel" of a cover image without actually having a cover image. To do this, I decided to add an image header to pages and posts that was easily able to be customized, but yet still compelling. I actually like it because I can change it between a 1, 2 or 3 image header very easily.
I still have a few things I want to do to improve it. It is responsive, and looks good on both desktop and mobile. The images however, could be better optimized, so I’ll probably do what I can to improve that for mobile once the holiday season is over and things calm down some. I want to make a few CSS tweaks here and there as well, but nothing major. The only thing I’m still debating on is whether I want to bother with comments. I’m leaning against it at the moment figuring people can get a hold of me on Twitter or other social media channels if they want, but of course I could change my mind down the road.
As part of this change I also ended up moving my hosting from Rackspace to Amazon Web Services. I've been meaning to look into AWS and finally decided to give it a try. Having your own server is convenient, but there's something to be said to not have to worry about it when you're only running a simple blog. I still have other sites on Rackspace, but we'll see how long they remain there.
Let me know what you think.