New Blog

Posted by Brian Carrigan on December 31, 2015

New Message, New Medium

I’ve wanted to start a new blog for a while now, and decided to use part of my holiday break to do so. There were a lot of really cool projects on my old site that still get quite a bit of traffic, but I wanted to move from a site where there are 2-3 project posts per year to a site with more frequent smaller posts. I envision it being small tips or resolutions to problems that we as programmers run into on a daily basis.

I also wanted it to be much simpler. The old site looked pretty crowded (there is a search bar?!), whereas the new one uses the clean-blog template to make a very simple but elegant site. I plan on adding more static pages, but love the uncrowded look of the large header and then the article to follow.

The way that I edit content is simpler now too. Originally my old site used pure HTML, but this got tiresome to edit, so I moved over to Wordpress. Wordpress is fine, but when I sit down to write I like looking at a text editor more than a complex interface. For these reasons, I switched over to using Github pages with Jekyll so that I could template in HTML and then write articles in Markdown. It is also nice to work with the full site locally, make changes, and then push those changes to Github when I am ready to deploy. A big thanks to Github for making this so easy!

Before Wordpress

After Atom

Simplicity is beauty.