I recently shuttered my Wordpress blog www.onceyougodigital.com. I had two problems with it:
- It was a record of my time in graduate school, but it was getting increasingly stale.
- It was getting bulky with themes and plugins, requiring frequent updates, with the content locked up in a database somewhere more or less outside my control.
I decided to burn it down and start over.
Problem 1
My blog was no longer representative of my life and work. As it grew more out-of-date, the idea of resurrecting it became increasingly burdensome. I looked into transferring the content to a free platform so at least I wasn’t paying for it anymore, but… ugh.
I strive to let go of material attachments, and I enjoy purging physical belongings from time to time, so why not digital belongings? See you later, blog.
Problem 2
Wordpress is fine for certain sites, but I just want a simple home for writing and documenting my projects. I wanted a basic blog with a simple layout that gave me as much control over style and content as possible.
I had been interested in trying a static site generator for a while. I dabble in Ruby at work, so Jekyll moved to the top of my list. When I found out you can host a Jekyll site on Github Pages with a custom domain – for free – I was sold.
Let’s do this
This blog will be a record of my professional life doing data work at Kickstarter and of my personal life in Brooklyn. I may write mostly about data, math, and statistics. Or I may expand to subjects like electronic music, burritos, and urban design. I’m keeping it loose this time. No attachments.