Relaunch

After way too many years running this old website on Wordpress, I have relaunched using a different platform. The site had become slow, fragile and broken because it relied on too many external resources, some of which eventually failed to load and broke the whole site. As the web has matured, it has become apparent that speed and simplicity are critical to whether a user will stick around on a site and even how well a site is ranked in Google searches. So I’ve removed a lot of unnecessary junk and replaced it with a cleaner and faster site.

The site is now run on Octopress, a static blog/site generator. I can write all pages and blog posts in Markdown as a text file on my computer. The whole site is regenerated once for each change and uploaded to the web server. Wordpress dynamically generates for every single page view, which seems unnecessary, especially given how rarely I update the site. And perhaps because Octopress is simpler and newer, most of the available themes are written with minimal script and CSS resources, loaded as late as possible.