The right tools for the job

It’s been over a year since my last post. I moved hosting in Aug 2013 and didn’t even bother to port davecranwell.com to the new host, so disenchanted was I. One of the reasons for stagnation was the painful management of the site CMS. It ran on Drupal 7, in which adding seemingly small, unimportant features was so arduous that my interest dwindled to nothing!

I’m not saying Drupal is bad, on the contrary it’s excellent when its features are used to the full. For a basic blog however, it was a software sledgehammer to this proverbial nut.

It was a classic case of using the right tools for the job, or in this case the wrong ones. This new site uses Jekyll, a Ruby-based static site generator, used as the engine behind Github Pages. This site is therefore hosted on Github Pages too because it’s a no-brainer. I’ve blogged about all this before for Torchbox and I felt it was time to eat my own dog food.