From Wordpress to Jekyll

This blog is now run on Jekyll, and here’s why.

I got real tired of WordPress for the following reasons:

1. It’s slow, for a simple blog.
2. Reliance on a database.
3. General heavy-ness. I didn’t really use most of its features, and it felt slow to navigate around the admin area.
4. Did I mention it’s slow?

I’ve toyed with the idea of moving this blog to Jekyll for a few years now but I felt like it wasn’t mature enough to handle the transition yet. I had fears and doubts about how it would handle SEO and analytics and whether I would lose any important functionality from plugins. Nothing could be further from the truth. Jekyll is now a robust tool for blogging or documentation, and is great for you if you like having more control over the format and output of your blog. I’ve compiled all of the helpful links I found when making the transition.

Changes to NPM’s unpublish policy

Today (March 30th 2016) NPM has made some important changes to their unpublish policy to avoid issues like the ones arising from the left-pad and kik unpublishing. You can read about the new policy here:

http://blog.npmjs.org/post/141905368000/changes-to-npms-unpublish-policy

These changes are clearly a step in the right direction and should prevent an individual from breaking the entire NPM ecosystem by removing a package that is depended on by many others.

I’m back

Unbeknownst to me my site was down for 7 days with the message “Error establishing a database connection.”. This occurs when the mysql service crashes on the server. I currently have no way to get notified of this, so any tips on how to do so on a DigitalOcean droplet would be great! The command used to get the mysql service up and running again is:

1
sudo service mysql restart

A review

Over the next week or so I’m going to be blowing out the cobwebs of this blog so to speak, in a review, because I’ve been neglecting it quite a bit and I want it to be a better platform for my tech writing. I’m aiming to:

• Rewrite the theme (again) for an easier to read and navigate blog, including the return of syntax highlighting. I’d previously converted about half of my code samples to use gists but I am going to go back to using a syntax highlighter (probably prism or highlight.js) to reduce load.
• Go through old posts and put disclaimers on those that are old and probably no longer valid, or have misleading information. I may just implement a flag for posts to display this warning so  I don’t have to do it manually.
• Speed up the performance of my site. If anyone has any tips on speeding up WordPress I’m all ears, I’ve tried to do a lot of things but they don’t seem to work for long. I may end up upgrading to a larger digitalocean droplet.

Apart from that, I aim to come up with more articles more frequently, a lot about JavaScript since that is what I’m primarily working with now. Thanks for reading, the changes will be coming soon.