New year, new habits
I finally made it! After years of “I really should”, I have finally left my old hosting provider, move all my sites to GitHub and start with some nice new habits for the new year.
For years now, I have had to use FTP to update my different web sites, since my hosting provider didn’t up. This has had the effect that I didn’t update my sites that often, since it has been a hassle. In a world where I use git everywhere, this had to end.
Since this decision was made just before my hosting contract was about to end, I was in a rush to get it in place. This was perfect, since it forced me to get it done, instead of having to spend another year in FTP hell.
I therefore decided to freeze my sites and push them to GitHub as static web sites. Since GitHub lets you use custom domain names for free, this was a golden start.
At first, I disabled Jekyll for all sites (more on that later), since it’s enabled by default and I didn’t have time to learn it before my hosting was cancelled. However, as I finished moving my sites, I decided to dig into this great tool and enable it for this web site as a start.
Jekyll is a static site generator that lets you build static sites (html, css & javascript) using convenient tools like data files, layout files, pages, posts, collections etc. It’s nothing less than amazing and the result is a lightning fast site, since it’s just html, css and JavaScript.
It’s rather ironic that I’ve spent so much time on refining my coding skills, just to end up with a static site generator, but you have to be pragmatic and pick the best tool for the job.
With this in place, I will move my blog from Wordpress to this site as well. Wordpress has been terrible for writing about tech and code. Instead, I will use Jekyll and write posts using MarkDown. Until I have completed this tedious task, my posts can be found at Wordpress.