A complete makeover

For those of you that come here frequenty, last few days a lot has happened. First, the looks of of the blog has changed completely from a blue colourful theme into a dark mode theme. And that´s what the title of this blog post refers to. The blog, not me.

So whats been changed is that I have moved the blog and rewritten it to be hosted through Github pages with Jekyll instead of WordPress with another hoster. This happened quite fast in a few days time over the last week when I could find the time, but it´s something ive been wanting to do for a long time.

Slow blog and full of maintenance

I know some has mentioned this when they´ve done the same move as I´ve done now. Tao Yang for instance mentioned all of the maintenance that comes with WrodPress as a big down-side with it. You can read his blog about it here in his blog. The maintenance part isn´t something I have missed out on, but the opposite. Every time I´ve logged in to the blog´s admin interface there has been 4-5 plugin updates to attend to. That´s boring, takes a lot of time and you never knew if things were gonna fail afterwards or not.

The other two main issues I have had with my current hoster is the amount of outages. I´ve been with the same hoster for about 5 or 6 years now and I lost count of how many times the blog alerted in the middle of the night for an outage lasting everywhere from 5 minutes to 4 hours. All with no previous notice. That along with the price, around $170 a year for a not so well performing blog got me to finally take the step of moving the blog. GitHub pages is free and you don´t need to pay for any extra SSL certificates, GitHub takes care of that for you and it took about 15 minutes after adding my custom domain before my site were secured and I had my new SSL certificate in place.

The switch

I saw Tao´s post earlier this year and that got me thinking about making the switch myself. Once I started digging into it, there were some serious time to put into it but most of the time were to just rewrite and make sure the formatting of the posts was correct even on the new blog. The switch isn´t that complicated once you get a hold of it, I managed to export all my post and have them converted into Markdown which saved me a lot of time in the end. After re-writing the posts, I had some issues getting the theme up and running but once that was handled I could just focus on publishing the blog and making sure the public DNS records pointed to the new site instead of the old one.

Switching provider completely

Since I was about to leave my hoster for GitHub Pages instead, I was thinking about where to keep my domain and the e-mail as well. In the end I decided to move my domain to GoDaddy since it opened up the opportunity for me to also use my custom domain (Orneling.se) with my Microsoft 365 Family subscription that I use privately.

Wrap-up

So, I mentioned I´ve put a lot of time into this move formatting and converting posts and apges, but that doesn’t mean everything will be 100% correct right now. If you see any faulty links or missing pictures etc. please leave a comment for me and I´ll try to take care of it as soon as possible.