Fixing up my place on the web
This site originated back in 2009 when I started applying to graduate programs and I needed a place for an online portfolio with a handful of projects. It started out as a small collection of HTML pages, each one describing a project, that you could click through in sequence.
At some point, I migrated all of the content into WordPress. I’d used WordPress before back on orderedpixels.com, which was my original blog where I posted weekly photos and updates about university life for friends and family. WordPress had improved quite a bit in the interim, and the WYSIWYG editor and upload manager made it really easy to make posts with images and everything.
But in the decade that’s followed, my fondness for WordPress has waned. I won’t bother with the details here, but the experience of posting has gotten frustrating to the point where I’ve basically stopped writing anything new here.
Recently, my colleagues have been encouring me to share more of my projects online. In particular, I’ve been starting to explore the RP2040 microcontroller and the Raspberry Pi Pico platforms based on it, and it seems that sharing my experiences might be helpful or at least interesting to the broader community.
So that’s led me to sit down and try to sort out my blogging situation. I’m dispensing with WordPress and have switched to a static site generated with Jekyll. This lets me write posts as simple Markdown files and handles keeping all of the tricky bits like navigation and tags coherent across the whole site. But the end result is plain old HTML—nothing to render on the server and no client-side JavaScript.
I’ve tried to migrate over all of the old content, and hopefully any existing permalinks should continue to work. I’ve even fixed up the images on some of the original pages that have been broken since the site migrated to WordPress over a decade ago.
The exception is that user-posted comments are gone (in practice, there were only ever a few of these; mostly the feature was just a magnet for spambots). If you want to get in touch or comment on a post, you can always send e-mail to me at my initials (the three letters in the logo) at the domain of this site.
Anyway, hopefully this works out and there will be some new content coming soon. There’s an Atom feed you can add to your reader if you want to subscribe to new posts.