Welcome to the New SmithPlatts Blog!

I posed the idea to change my blog to either a newly named/themed WordPress blog, or do something entirely different.

Clearly, I went the different route!

I wanted something that was fast, easy to add posts, and most of all simple. I created a new WordPress blog, migrated some posts over, changed the theme, did some other stuff … and then did nothing. It never felt right. I wasn’t sure what it was. Was it that it was still WordPress?

I have always liked WordPress. They have managed to create a huge self-service website hosting solution that caters for just about everyone. You can host your own. You can have them host it. You can run with free everything. You can pay for some really cool addon features.

But I was never a fan of the post editor/posting process. I found it cumbersome. I found it restricting. I am a technical person and therefore want to be able to write my posts in HTML or Markdown and publish as I see fit.

Yes, WordPress did offer some of those features, but it still seemed too … claustrophobic inducing?

So I kept an eye out; looked at what others were doing. That’s how I found out about static page-based sites/blogs. Jekyll is one of the favourites, but there are many static site architectures and pre-processors out there. Essentially, you create your content in a dynamic and modular manner, then build the site! It builds all the pages so that they are complete static representations of what you want them to be. This means that only one page is served for one link, to everyone. You can add in some JS magic here and there, but the idea is that you don’t need to.

GitHub¹ happens to also provide a pretty neat service called GitHub Pages. It is GitHub’s site hosting service which also incorporates Jekyll and other static site building technologies.

So, I created a site and had at it! And this is the fruit of the labour. A site that is created, themed, and coded the way I want giving me the ability to tweak or rewrite as I see fit!

And I am bloody happy with it!

If you have come over here from the old blog, the content will be similar to what you have already been used to. If you are new, it will be filled with ramblings about tech, code, motorbikes, or whatever the hell I feel like at the time.

Enjoy!!!