At the end of 2012, I transitioned this blog from its long-time home on WordPress.com to an Octopress/Jekyll-generated site with the static content hosted on Github Pages. Over the past week or so, I have moved back to WordPress, albeit a hosted instance through Entchev.
I originally left WordPress.com due to chafing with some of the perfectly understandable restrictions. Octopress promised, and delivered, total control. For a time, I was happy. In the process, I learned a lot about Jekyll and reacquainted myself with the benefits of static content, which is the original state of the web.
The Octopress/Jekyll experience opened my eyes to how much of the geospatial content we serve on the web can and should be served without the use of specialized geospatial servers or bizarre and ironically-positioned “interoperability” standards. That was exceedingly beneficial.
I decided to move back because, ultimately, static content wants to be static. I came to realize that I want my blog to be more dynamic. My biggest problem became mobile posting, which was almost comically impossible for a modern web tool in 2014. I did find a few very convoluted ways to accomplish it, and the moment I found myself seriously considering one of these Rube Goldberg methods, I knew it was time to jump off.
I found myself taking notes on paper and then re-entering them later when I was back at my machine. This did give me the opportunity to edit, and was certainly “artisanal” or something, but it essentially got in the way of how I wanted to blog. That, of course, is the death knell for a technology.
I don’t regret a minute of my time with Octopress/Jekyll. I enumerated some of the positives above but, ultimately, the biggest positive was that I renewed my appreciation for content management systems and their place in the technology ecosystem.
