I’ve been thinking about different ways to redevelop my personal site. Since joining Xavier in 2014, I’ve been isolated in the Campus Suite CMS, which has it’s ups and downs much like many CMS' out there.

After doing a site evaluation, I determined that WordPress isn’t meeting my needs anymore. But it’s nothing that WordPress has done, it’s about me and taking care of my site. Working with WordPress Themes can be a complicated mess, plus there’s the database that needs attention.

Throughout all of this, I determined that I didn’t want to deal with a database driven system anymore. That’s where Jekyll comes in.

Jekyll is a database free, static website generator that I can run locally on my laptop. While it doesn’t allow me to use programming languages (such as PHP or ColdFusion) to generate any dynamic content, I don’t care. I get enough experience at writing those things in personal and work-related projects.

This site is going to be simplified, but I will work on loading old posts and comments from the WordPress site for historical reference.

Hope you enjoy the new look and (hopefully) a better experience.

Here’s what I used to build the site: