This post marks the first time I write for my new, LIVE Jekyll/GitHub powered website—though CLEARLY an asterisk attached with some underlying italicized words ought to be squirreled away somewhere as this isn't the first time I've done this sort of thing as it was a feature of 2020—a really GREAT year for me, incidentally.

I feel good to have made a break from that heavy-footed behemoth that we know as WordPress, that bloated juggernaut that stomps through sentences, pressing on to become everything to everyone. There's some things I'll never need, like right-to-left language support and a myriad of scripts in the background that I never feigned an interest in what they exactly did for me. And was I further propelled in life by its WYSIWYG editor, Gutenberg? There was a time in my life when I disabled it's embedded editor entirely and just tagged things up!

Clearly, I'm more of a markdown audience. And while the setup was longer than I would take in WordPress for I'd just download a theme, point a child and setup critical plugins that would soon be abandoned by their authors making them broken in the next WP rollout, this time around, I just made my own theme and just "include" the thing together.

I initially began to adopt the evolution of my 3-year-old retrowave schema. I spent a day retrofitting it to my new structure and updating the look with a reduced color palette as things got a little busy over the years. As I finished, I realized I wanted something...minimal...clean. So, I made this schema involving three colors: 1) text; 2) canvas; and 3) accent.

I wanted less sizzle and more RIBEYE.

As far as content, I opened up the warehouse and pulled everything out. I realized that this is a personal blog—why not? I'm not peddling anything, but just stand here somewhere near the intersection of self-expression and goal motivation. Plus, with the way my hands are a sieve to my content, it would be good to find another way to hold on to stuff. It always makes me wince when I look back and realize all of the posts I lost from that 2005-2012 era—including my first visit to Europe daily journal, due to that hard drive crash in 2014. I'm then reminded of my loss of all of my 2019 posts because of a misplaced WordPress export. My move to this text file format preserves my words while making them accessible with ease.

And yes, this is ALL static which means a couple of things: it's time to "shake and bake" as this thing is FAST and two, I no longer have to bare my teeth at those Russian and Chinese Cylons scouring my place for a crack in my firewall! I won't lie: potential attacks EVERY day does not invoke a focused mind.

Of course, I'm far from done with this rollout. I've gotta do some cosmetic things and make it a better conduit of achievement, but it's good to get something out on the table. It'll serve to hewn my efforts to win 2021. It's why this thing is here.