Steven Brokaw

As everyone knows, the number one reason for poor craftsmanship is poor tools. To that end, I am addressing my poor blogging output by changing the blogging platform. I have moved from WordPress to Jekyll.

Joking aside, WordPress is powerful in lots of ways, but it does require care and feeding. For a business website, I would spend money on dedicated WordPress hosting that takes care of it. For a personal site, I don’t want to spent the money, nor do I want to spend the time to do it myself.

So here I am with a new Jekyll site. Most of the content is ported over, but not all of it came over cleanly. There’s some mangled posts. Also, I still have to find a solution to move the images over. Things may appear a bit under construction for a while.

If you’ve ever tried to research web hosting, you’re probably noticed the disreputable nature of hosting reviews. Most review sites are riddled with affiliate links, which calls into question all the reviews and ratings.

When I was shopping for managed WordPress hosting, one site I’ve come to trust is Review Signal. They now have a 2018 edition of their WordPress hosting benchmarks. I have a Lightning Base account based on their recommendation, and I’m very happy with it. I had never heard about the company before I read about them in Review Signal.

I’ve also tried Pressable. They rank highly, and their interface was nicer than Lighting Base. They are also a Texas comany. But I only have one site I really need top-tier hosting for, and Lightning Base had better pricing for that use case.

Jia Tolentino at the New Yorker laments that blogging is over:

Blogging, that much-maligned pastime, is gradually but surely disappearing from the Internet, and so, consequently, is a lot of online freedom and fun.

As evidence she cites the closing of

• Grantland
• Toast
• Gawker
• Gothamist
• Awl & Hairpin

Those are her idea of blogs? If you had asked me for an example of a blog, none of those would have come up.

Now here is a list of honest to goodness blogs, curated by Julia Evans. Where did I find this list? At Scripting News, a blog.

Michael Tsai on Swift:

I like Swift. But, having programmed in probably more than a dozen languages, I would not classify Swift as easy to learn. It’s at the end with the harder ones like C++.

People see the var declarations and think, “Javascript!”. Type inference hides a lot of the complexity of the type system. So, yeah easy things are easy. But then you think to yourself that you want to create your own collection and you’re deep into the a generics system that you never realized was there.