Well, this is different.

Today, jaredwsmith.com has moved to GitHub Pages and is now generated with Jekyll. Yes, that’s right – no WordPress, for the first time since 2005(!!!).

Why?

Long story short, it came down to a few variables:

  • I’m not writing much here at all. That’s just the bottom line.
  • While WordPress is wonderful, and I will continue to use it every day professionally, it has become serious overkill for what I am trying to accomplish on this here website. For something I rarely touch, it has quite a large attack surface if I should leave a plugin untouched, for instance.
  • The server that has hosted jaredwsmith.com has really turned into the @chswx server, and needs to be more dedicated to that mission going forward.
  • I should learn new things. Doing ANYTHING with Ruby counts in my case.
  • Holy crap I can write blog posts in vim :)

Where are all the old posts?

Safe and sound in a backup. I’ll be culling through them as time permits and reposting the ones with the most value. The rest will stay in said backup for me to revisit every once in a while as a growth check (e.g. to see how much I cringe from reading them).

But your SEO!

I wasn’t generating much, if any, organic traffic anymore. Looking at my Jetpack stats this morning, I saw just a trickle of a few hits. I’m pretty confident much of the traffic to jaredwsmith.com was either bot or malicious traffic, so to get that off my server is honestly kind of a relief. Thus, a reboot. I suspect that with a narrower focus on technology, this new iteration of the site will be just fine.

What can I expect here going forward?

You know, I’m not sure. I think I’m figuring that out myself. I may write more professional, long-form stuff on occasion. I may just leave it be. I do expect that I’ll be linking to projects and the like here, though, with a general technology bent. I really don’t tend to publish much about my day-to-day work, especially since I moved into management. However, perhaps it’s time to start sharing some more knowledge, hoping that others can learn from my mistakes.

Happy Pi Day. Wash your hands.