Website changes, again

A few years have passed so it seemed like it was time for yet another website change. I’ve not changed much visually, but I’ve changed the entire static content generation stack.

Previously, my site was generated using a static content generator called Nanoc. It took a set of source files written in Markdown, HTML, Haml, Sass, and a bunch of other stuff and output them as HTML and CSS. I had a lot of complexity. So much so that I never touched the content and didn’t want to upgrade Nanoc. Plus, the way rules worked changed in Nanoc 3 and I didn’t want to face untangling my mess.

Along comes Jekyll! I had tried Jekyll before but I decided to give it another shot. It seems more simplistic in ways compared to Nanoc which can be better or worse depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. In my case, it seemed like it’d be pretty easy to convert and it was! I still have Haml, Sass, Markdown and the like but it feels easier.

Some other changes I made during the conversion process:

• All Haml layouts were converted to HTML
• Redid the Blog page to look nicer
• Added pagination support to the blog page
• Redid the blog post layout to have Older and Newer links
• Upgraded to the latest Bootstrap and jQuery 2
• Added minification of HTML using Html_Press

And now, after all of this, we’ll see if I update my site more often. Probably not.