In the last few days I have made some changes to this website. As well as a different look to the site, there are also some significant changes behind the scenes. I have moved from a hosted Wordpress site to a static site, built with Jekyll and hosted on Github Pages.
I have many reasons for the change, but mostly I wanted to both simplify the look of the site, and also make it simpler to maintain. Running a Wordpress site it pretty straightforward, but it does come with a certain overhead of updates, and potential security risks. Once you have a few things sorted out, the Jekyll workflow is very simple. And the migration was made easy because of the numerous blog posts and how-tos written by others who have made a similar migration. I also took the opportunity to consolidate posts from my recent site, with an old Wordpress.com blog.
I almost decided not to have comments on the site (out of the box Jekyll doesn't support comments), but in the end went for two commenting systems. I have conventional below-the-line comments provided by Disqus, but I also included in-line annotation using the hypothes.is service. I have been wanting to try this for a while. Disqus also allowed me to import the comments from my old blogs very easily.
I would be really interested in any feedback on the new site. With the new site comes a commitment to write a little more often, so please subscribe to the RSS feed or follow me on twitter where I will post notifications of new posts.
