CMS/SSG Updates: Ghost, WordPress, and More
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Medevel ☛ Ghost SMTP Configuration: How to Get Your Emails Working Right
If you're using Ghost for your blog or website, you know it’s one of the best platforms for writers who want a clean, focused environment. I’ve used Ghost for years, and I recommend it to anyone looking for a no-fuss, performance-first blog platform.
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Joost de Valk ☛ Breaking the Status Quo
WordPress is at a crossroads, now even more clearly then when I wrote my previous post on WordPress’s roadmap. I had very much intended to leave this topic alone for a bit until after the holiday break, until, last night, Matt imposed a holiday break on us all.
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Jeremy Cherfas ☛ Redesigning one of my websites
Yesterday, almost nine months after starting, my from-the-ground-up redesign of the podcast website went live. Of course I was not working on it full time, although I have notes from 25 different sessions. Now that it is up and running, it seems like a good idea to reflect on the process. The primary reflection being, it is a pain.
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The Register UK ☛ Automattic vs WP Engine: WordPress wars heat up
It is and remains such a no-brainer that today, WordPress powers nearly half of the [Internet]'s websites. But, then, just this year, things went bad. Really, really bad.
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Old New Blog
I started this blog back in 2010. Back then I used Wordpress and it worked reasonably well. In 2018 I decided to switch to a static generated site, mostly because the Wordpress blog felt slow to load and it was hassle to maintain. Back then the go-to static site generator was Jekyll, so I went with that. Lately I’ve been struggling with it though, because in order to keep all the plugins working, I needed to use older versions or Ruby, which meant I had to use Docker to build the blog locally. Overall, it felt like too much work and for the past few years I’ve been eyeing Hugo - more so since Carl and others migrated most of KDE websites to it. I mean, if it’s good enough for KDE, it’s good enough for me, right?
So this year I finally got around to do the switch. I migrated all the content from Jekyll. This time I actually went through every single post, converted it to proper Markdown, fixed formatting, images etc. It was a nice trip down the memory lane, reading all the old posts, remembering all the sprints and Akademies… I also took the opportunity to clean up the tags and categories, so that they are more consistent and useful.
Finally, I have rewritten the theme - I originally ported the template from Wordpress to Jekyll, but it was a bit of a mess, responsivity was “hacked” in via JavaScript. Web development (and my skills) has come a long way since then, so I was able to leverage more modern CSS and HTML features to make the site look the same, but be more responsive and accessible.