In the past, I used Wyam to generate the website files for my software development blog. I chose Wyam because it is a .NET static site generator and I am a .NET software developer. With Wyam, I got to play around with Razor and C# while working on my blog. And I learned a lot about HTML, CSS, JavaScript and even Markdown. But now it's time to move on.

I've already made some changes at the start of this year. Namely, I decided to start publishing new software development posts onto my journal. As I mentioned in this post, I didn't really like how it turned out. I didn't like how the content was getting mixed in with other totally unrelated posts. So, after only a few months with that setup, I decided to move my dev blog out into a stand alone blog once more.

Instead of going back to a static site generator, I decided to spin up a new blog with write.as. There are two main reasons for this.

Ease of Publishing

First, I loved the ease of publishing new content with write.as. Their Markdown editor is superb. The writing experience is distraction free. And all I really need to write new posts is a web browser. Yes, even the web browser on my mobile phone will work. I can't exactly say the same thing about writing new posts with a static site generator.

Keeping it Simple

Second, I wanted to keep things simple by keeping most of my sites under one roof.

I've realized that it was hard to maintain websites that were on different platforms. To post to my dev blog, I had to do it with Wyam. To post to my microblog, I had to do it at micro.blog. To post to my journal or music blog or photo blog, I had to use write.as.

Keeping my sites under one roof, using the same method of publishing, would make things a lot simpler. At least, that's the idea. So, I'm trying that out.

Whether this new setup will work or not, only time will tell. But the one great thing about owning your domain and personal websites, is that you can do whatever you want. You want to experiment with a different way of publishing, go ahead. You want to try a new theme, give it a go. You want to write longer posts, or shorter posts, it's all up to you. Your websites, your rules.

Anyway, that's all for tonight. I just wanted to publish a formal migrated to write.as post for this blog. I feel better now with that out of the way. So, I'll catch y'all in the next post. Thanks for reading.

Tags: #SiteUpdates #Blog

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Update 4/21/2021: I've decided to keep my software development posts separate from my personal posts. I've tried having them both on my journal and I didn't really like how they turned out. So, I've created this new dev blog on write.as to house my posts on software development.

I started this dev blog back in December 2018. It initially started out as a Jekyll Now blog hosted on Github Pages. After about two weeks I made the switch to a Wyam powered blog. And it's been that way since then.

This was my first real website. The first one that I bought a domain name for. Fast forward to 2021 and I now have 4 websites. There's this dev blog, my personal journal, my music blog and a photo-blog. At one point in 2020, I also had a micro-blog that has since been discontinued. So, in total, I had five websites.

After my second digital declutter, I've come to the realization that five websites is one too many. I felt like I couldn't keep maintaining all five at once. Since then, I've been thinking about reducing the number of websites I maintained.

I've thought about combining this dev blog with my personal journal a few times in the past. What was holding me back every time, was that I wasn't sure it was a good idea to have one site that contained both professional and personal content. However, I was also keenly aware of the creeping exhaustion of maintaining multiple websites at once.

There's also the fact that to publish content on this dev blog, I needed to do it on a machine that had .NET Core, Git and Visual Studio Code installed on it. On the other hand, to publish content on my personal journal, all I needed was a web browser.

So, in the interest of simplifying things for 2021, I've decided to stop publishing software development posts on this blog. I'm keeping the existing content on this blog for now. But new software development posts will now be published on my personal journal.

I'm not sure if there are a lot of people who read this dev blog. If you are one of them though, I would like to invite you to check out my personal journal. And if that's something you don't want to do, that's okay too. In any case, thank you for reading this post and I hope you have a nice day!

Tags: #SiteUpdates #Blog

Discuss... or leave a comment below.