SchmidtHappens

Welcome to the new (and hopefully improved) SchmidtHappens. I have been thinking long and hard on how to move forward with my blog and while Tumblr was great for a while I kept hitting walls. I found myself spending less time writing and more time trying to figure out how I could do all the things that I wanted to do. Finally, I made the decision to leave Tumblr and try a new approach.

Since I am a huge fan of Github I decided to really look into using their "Github Pages" feature. Basically, this lets you set up a new repository name user.github.com (substitute "user" for your github account name). This project can be either static HTML pages or you can choose to take advantage of Jeckyll. I won't go into details here on what Jekyll is and how to set this up but rest assured that I will have a post coming up about it. For now, just know that Jekyll is a blog aware static site generator. Once you have pushed your first commit to Github you will have a shiny new website at "user.github.com" in about 10 minutes. After the initial commit the changes you push are almost instantaneous.

After getting up and running on this I really like this technique. I now have full control over how my site and pages work. And, as an added bonus, I can now sleep easy knowing that my site is backed up and available to me even offline. Having the blog as a code repository just feels much better as it fits nicely with what I do on a daily basis.

All in all I would have to say I am very satisfied with the transition. I will be adding features back in, like comments, as time goes by. But for now I'm just glad I have a much simpler way to publish articles.