Geotagged at home (51.427051,-0.333344)

Saying Farewell to WordPress and Hello to Nikola

I first registered the vicchi.org domain name in April of 2001, mainly because at the time, someone else had got to garygale.com before me (though I managed to acquire that domain in July 2009) and there's been some form of website here every since.

But this site has languished and seemingly unloved for a while. The last post was at the end of 2018 but actually the last time I really wrote something was ... heck, September 2015. It was time to fix that.

Initially this site was early 2000's, hand crafted HTML. There was a brief excursion with Bloxsom in 2001, I think, but Perl and I have never really got on. Ever since, WordPress has been my CMS of choice. I've written a few custom themes and even a few plugins including WP Biographia which amazingly has clocked up over 70,000 downloads since its release. WordPress and I got along just fine. It was written in PHP and I was relatively adept at PHP wrangling.

But in 2018 I finally got around to learning Python, mainly to try and get the WhereOnEarth WOEID data set back online and these days I write a lot more Python than I do PHP. So when the urge to resurrect my blog got too strong and the desire for yet another theme facelist beckoned, going back to PHP and going back to the WordPress style of PHP didn't really appeal.

So for now at least, vicchi.org is a staticly generated site, built by Nikola, containing all of my WordPress posts and pages that I exported and converted into Markdown and with a lightweight Tailwind CSS theme as a set of Jinja templates.

All of which has given me my next set of side projects, involving my geotagged posts, my Swarm checkins and what I've been listening to and watching. Let's see how long it takes before I write another post.

Gary
Gary Gale

I'm Gary ... a Husband, Father, CTO at Kamma, geotechnologist, map geek, coffee addict, Sci-fi fan, UNIX and Mac user