First of all, sorry for all of those who came here through Google, and were redirected to the homepage. I tried my best to preserve URLs but I couldn’t figure out a great way to do that.

For recurring readers, you may have noticed the site has changed. That’s because this blog is now powered by WordPress!

I’m generally not a fan of heavy-handed systems, but the user experience eventually convinced me this was the right route. I’m now using WordPress, and even the paid edition.

Why I chose WordPress #

Wordpress as a platform provides a lot of tools to simplify the blog authoring experience. With Pelican, my blog writing experience was the following:

  1. Create a new file in restructured text, add some boilerplate
  2. adding images requires copying the image to the images/ directory, then adding the image link by hand into the file.
  3. re-rendering the post over and over again.
  4. calling the execute script, which handles publishing the files to Github.

The disadvantages of the platform were:

  1. The iteration was slow, including the ability to quickly add and manipulate images.
  2. The experience was on desktop only, and Git to boot, so I had to have enough time to clone (or pull or push) a git repository and fire up a text editor. Not great for just jotting down a quick note.

Wordpress reduces this whole process, and support both mobile and desktop:

  1. Create a new post in the UI
  2. Add images by just selecting the file. I can do basic modifications like crop and rotate directly in wordpress.
  3. click “publish”

Overall, the reduced friction has let me write posts more frequently, as well as use it as a bed for notes in the meantime.

There are also other benefits:

  • several themes available so I can quickly style.
  • mobile app
  • SEO friendly

And probably features I’m sure to discover as well.

So, welcome to my new Wordpress blog!