New year, new habits
I finally made it! After years and years of “I really should”, I have finally managed to abandon my old hosting provider, move all my sites to GitHub and start with some nice new habits for the new year.
For years, I have had to use FTP to update my different web sites, since my old hosting provider hasn’t kept up. This has had the effect that I haven’t updated my sites that often, since it has been a hassle. In a world where I enjoy using git almost everywhere, these old ways 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 spending another year in FTP hell. I thus 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 decided to disable 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.
In short, Jekyll is a static site generator that lets you build static web sites (html + css + javascript) with convenient tools like data files, layout files, pages, posts, custom collections etc. It’s nothing less than amazing and the result is lightning fast web sites, since there is no backend or database, just plain html files and javascript.
It’s rather ironic that I’ve spent so much time on refining my sytem development 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 all this in place, I will begin to 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 the tedious task of moving the entire blog from Wordpress, my old posts can be found at Wordpress.
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