After a long, long wait I have finally sorted out my personal website and brought my blogging all under one roof. Welcome to the new blog!
I’ll briefly discuss the how a little later in the post, but first the why:
Back in July 2013 I decided it made sense to split up my blogging to suit the different audiences that might be visiting. Did people looking at stuff about parenting want to see my geeky projects? And what about the people engaging with my theological posts, what did they want to see? So I split it all up, and tried to keep everything in it’s rightful place.
That had a few downsides:
- Some people do want to see all my posts
- I didn’t have any one central hub of all that is me
- Sometimes it was hard to choose where to post things and sometimes that meant I didn’t bother
So I planned for a while to build a separate site that would bring everything back together. But it was complicated and I couldn’t really be bothered. In the meantime it was obvious that Blogger was not really good enough any more.
Thus began my search for a simple, but effective blogging platform that I could use without heavy development requirements. I settled on using Jekyll hosted at GitHub.
This means a really clean site. As I make updates it rebuilds a copy of all the related pages, so that all I’m serving is static content. That also means it’s pretty fast!
The How
Firstly it’s worth mentioning the platforms that I looked at but dismissed:
- Wordpress - too bulky, too slow, too many security concerns
- Joomla or Drupal - major overkill
- Ghost - looks good, but pages aren’t handled great and I’d need Node hosting
I eventually settled on using Jekyll, which I liked for it’s flexibility and geek-appeal.
I had a look around for themes and settled on the Ttskch Theme which I’ve been able to use with very little modification. I changed the colour-scheme using the colour scheme designer at paletton.com. All in all, I think it looks pretty good, don’t you?
To save me keeping track of multiple avatars, I’m pulling in my avatar set at Gravatar, which means I can update in one place and my avatar updates on loads of websites including this one.
I’m hosting at GitHub, although I could just as easily have hosted the site on my own host as it’s all static pages. But I like the way the source control, build and hosting is all tied into one.
This is the first post on the new blog, but I’ve already got a few ideas, so hopefully it won’t be long before there’s some more posts!