About Albrecht's blog

Welcome to my blog on GitHub Pages. If you know my old Wordpress blog or one of my sites you’ll recognise the design aka theme. After porting the the design I ported the majority of posts here and shut down the old Wordpress blog.

Why leave Wordpress

After having had a Wordpress / PHP blog on 1&1 webspace running well for over a decade and having gone through the toils of creating a theme adapted to the design of my other web sites there was no need to change. Well I hated the backend and some other features, but most of that is just inconvenience.

End 2018 the provider built up pressure to switch to a new PHP version — 3 to 7 here — and quite rightly so. But that required a Wordpress update. As we feared an crash when updating over many revisions, a Wordpress update was studiously avoided.
But it went astonishingly fast and all seemed OK for a while. But then incompatibilities with some essential old plug-ins arose. By activating or de-activating those plug-ins one could either spoil the rendering or inhibit the administration.

Why considering GitHub Pages and its blog features

It was evident that repairing the ruins of the Wordpress blog would neither be easy nor the solution beautiful. So why not use the time to learn something new.

Additionally a bit research showed many people with a similar point of view toward Wordpress were happy with GitHub.
Someone posted: “The best on Git is GitHub”.

Status and to do

• The basic learning curve is mastered: Git, Jekyll, Markdown, Liquid …
• Ruby and all else for local development and testing is installed on the Windows workstation.
• Templates and styles were adapted to the sites’ design as well as the optional multilingualism.
• A comment feature was implemented without external providers with Github issues and pure JavaSript (without jQuery).

Résumé

GitHub Pages is gorgeous. The ease of local testing and deployment comes as default.
Hopefully, GitHub and GitHub Pages last a bit longer than Google+ and Kenai and …