Back to WordPress

And so I’m moving my blog! I was maintaining it using a static site generator (Jekyll), but it’s time to head back to WordPress, where it originally began.

It was fun using Jekyll for a while. Rolling a lot of your own features, like Open Graph metadata, Twitter Card info, comments (although that’s usually just using someone else’s service), analytics, and so on, is amusing, but I’ve learnt what I want from the experience and I no longer want the chore of maintaining it all. And there’s always more to do — I did not want to implement my own AMP support (although I see there’s a Jekyll plugin that might do this? 🤷‍♀️), or to write code to manage image source sets for responsive design, and so on. WordPress manages this all, which is a lovely place to be.

And using WordPress means that I can easily post from my phone, although it’s not as though I post much anymore 😋. But I am sitting at a coffee shop editing this draft on my phone, a draft I started on my desktop. Setting up something to do that with Jekyll is not where I want to spend my time.

WordPress is also previewing a lovely editor for future release, called Gutenberg. Its focus is to allow better media support, which is doable in Jekyll, but since you’re doing most everything manually, it’s tedious as hell. 

I still have the Jekyll site up and running, since there is other static content hosted there that is separate from the blog, and it’s useful to have a site closely under my control. WordPress also has an API, so my most recent posts still appear on my site. And, while I didn’t need to, migrating to WordPress let me play a bit with a JavaScript framework called Vue for managing the rendering of my WordPress blog posts.

Moving back to WordPress doesn’t mean that there’s less to play with. There’s tons! And now I have fewer blogging things to maintain. Things I got to play with: I made a little skeleton screen for when the blog articles are being loaded (think of how a site like Facebook has a vague suggestion of text while it loads — a “skeleton” of a page), and I played (as always)  with css animations and transitions. The Fetch API is an interesting, HTML5, API for HTTP requests that most browsers natively support, although it seems a bit tedious for making POSTs and PUTs.

Anyway, I’m back on WordPress! And it’s nice to have a fleshed out toolset to be using. Go WordPress!

Feature image by Markus Spiske on Unsplash.