A new space to blog

January 2017 seems as good a time as any to take stock of all my various webspaces, tidy it all up, and start things over again.

What does this all mean?

A few differences, first and foremost. I’ve become a bit tired of the bloat of using blogging platforms like WordPress for my online stuff: there are too many extras, too many plugins, themes, settings and so on that I don’t really need. Something I’ve noticed about my online endeavours is that I am trying to get back to something a bit more minimal – with varied success.

Now, that isn’t to say I’m now anti-WP. I still really like it, and will use it for some upcoming webdesign projects I’m working on. I just won’t use it for my own spaces any more. Which has led me here.

This is now a website created by Jekyll, a piece of software that is what’s known as a static site generator. Essentially that means that whatever I write for my site gets run through Jekyll and produced as a complete HTML page. This is different from using WordPress, as the way that works is by ferrying content from a database to fill out the bits and pieces of template that go into making your blog or website look the way it does. Not having something like WP making these calls back and forth to a content repository means that this site should be much faster to load and less likely to break when things go wrong.

However, that doesn’t mean that I have gone whole hog and coded this all from the ground up. That is a long-term ambition of mine, but is a bit beyond my capabilities at present. I’m indebted at the moment to having borrowed a lot of tips and tricks from places like Travis Neilson’s DevTips videos and following what people are doing with Jekyll sites, like Michael Rose with Made Mistakes. What you’re reading right now is created using a Jekyll theme called Simplicity by Moritz Sauer. At the moment, the most I’ve done is change the colour scheme, but I’m looking forward to seeing what other tweaks I can make. Seriously, I am so grateful to these three people and others like them who share so much in online development and design communities, and make a lot of it available through things like the MIT license.

So what does this all mean for me?

I am hoping to experiment and build this year! Initially this will take the form of three tangible goals related to my webspaces and how I’ll build and/or change them this year.

1. I want to blog here and this will focus on three main areas: republishing and rewriting stuff from my old blog; writing about my current thoughts on teaching and other stuff related to EFL; and the bits and pieces I’m doing with materials design and teacher training.
2. Put together a proper online portfolio of my work in ELT, including teaching, training, and materials design work that I’ve done.
3. Sorting out The Sound Book to the point that it’s in a form that people can easily use – so, no I’m not leaving WordPress behind, at least not just yet.