So this happened, I finally bit the bullet on switching blog engines once again - spending on hosting for a blog that’s getting next to no traffic is still a waste of money even if the cost is miniscule. Besides with my work being more and more focused on business operations and thus, meetings, I’ve found my itch to write in IDEs returning in my free time, even if it’s reskinning my humble blog. Aand the practice of writing long form content is something I look forward to.

Github pages and Jekyll

I’ve been here before. I’ve went from wordpress to dasBlog to ghost to wordpress with at least a few failed migration attempts in-between. Trying out features and pondering on different merits of this or that fad. I tend to do that, that’s one side of my inner deamon obsessing over not making a mistake. However just like with many other things, it comes between me and actually doing the thing that I wanted to do. This time the move is driven by pragmatic penny pinching and shifting towards mindset of preserving control of my words. Thus:

prioritization of markdown over fancy web editing screens. Yes it’s not ideal, but with Jekyll it gives me the simplicity to store my static thoughts as static files, something I started to appreciate from my short wenture into orgmode this year.
planning for publishing from PC rather than any device (I could use other platofrms for such fleething thoughts if I needed to)
simple enough that I have the illusion of control (though Jekyll setup on my older laptop nearly broke my confidence in that)

Github Pages fill these needs currently. Markdown based. Free for the scope that I have in mind. Gives me some much needed practice with git commands and some tinkering opportunity with styles (without need to overcommit with custom blog engine .. been there before)

Jekyll on the other hand is a bit of a different beast. For someone who has no practical experience with Ruby at this point in time gemfiles mean another set of tools and rules to familiarize with. Thankfully at the core it’s simple. If you set up your environment correctly - I managed to mess up my install initially by ignoring one important distinction - you need Ruby + Devkit and not just Ruby installed. Themes are super easy to add, and supposedly to modify, however I’ve gone with a different route with bashing together something from scratch. At least for now that’ll do, I’ll probably just pay for a ready made one once I grow tired from maintenance.

But what about the comments

Yes, no way to comment posts at least for now. I mean if you have something to say you’ll likely find a channel to reach me and it’s not like I despise feedback, but seeing previous reincarnations of things I shared accumulate mindless bot responses that tried to push links with varying degree of pretense I don’t want to play or pay for participating in that game for a while. After all, I’m doing this under the presumption that words and stories have value on their own, so here will be a place for stories. Dialogue and discourse will find a place for itself.