Website Relaunch

Wow, I finally pressed the button and my rebuilt website has been launched. I have to admit, I was quite nervous about making the actual switch from WordPress to a static HTML site. I kept thinking "What have I missed?", but throw caution to the wind, it's my own website - if anything breaks, I'll just fix it.

It feels like I've wanted to move away from having a dynamically-generated website for the longest time. I'd been looking at various tools to help me "go static" - from Assemble to Jekyll, most of the static-site generators have their pros & cons, my main concern was my comfort zone. Just to say, I have built websites using Assemble and Jekyll, but in those cases, I found myself struggling from an extensibility perspective - if I needed my own plug-ins, I'd need to develop with Ruby or Node.js - I mean, I could, but it's out my comfort-zone.

About a year ago, I heard about a new static-site generator called Wyam, it was open-source and written in .NET, and looked well documented! I couldn't wait to play! Unfortunately, between my work and Umbraco-community commitments, I struggled to make the time for it. That was until at the start of this year, I told myself to stop making excuses and get on with it!

So I started to rebuild my website with Wyam. After an initial learning curve of the key concepts, I was flying - I even started to contribute modules back to the Wyam core, (the minifications modules - if anyone is interested?) I had most of my website/blog rebuilt within a day or so. (Deciding to go "Back to basics" helped speed things along much faster.)

Now I bet you're wondering what took me so long between starting and relaunching my website? It turns out to be all those little things - reformatting of line code snippets, redirection rules (.htaccess), Disqus commenting, contact form, etc. To be honest, I probably could have relaunched a few weeks ago, but I'd re-prioritised working on one of my Umbraco packages (Ditto v0.9.0-beta - again, if anyone is interested?).

So here we are... website relaunched - CSS naked, but HTML semantically enriched. Let me know what you think in the comments.