Welcome to Jekyll
The last time I wrote on WordPress was to simply announce the deactivation of my Facebook profile (no I didn’t block you). And the one before that is merely my brain fart on Call of Duty: Black Ops III theories.
Overall, I am terribly lazy blogger. Maybe a change of scenery will help - so I am moving out of WordPress.
It didn’t take a long, thoughtful consideration before I settle down on Jekyll. The decision is driven by several objectives I want to achieve with this new, simpler homepage:
Platform-agnostic resume generator
My current resume is written with Apple Pages. However, there is no guarantee that I will use Mac in the future. In fact, my desktop runs on Ubuntu most of the time, and I only use MacBook Air issued by my company for work.
I would like to have a web based resume (not LinkedIn the creep) that looks great, is responsive, and is printer friendly - by using print media query in CSS.
Faster site performance
My WP site is currently hosted with a Malaysian shared hosting company. One of the countries I would like to work in next is China, the People’s Republic of China to be exact. Unfortunately, their connection to outside world has been censored and throttled badly thanks to the Great Firewall.
Having a static site that is CDN-friendly will be a boon, I figure that I can have a copy hosted within China, and one outside - GitHub Pages for example.
Of course, WordPress itself is pretty bloated. Jekyll default Minima theme is pretty damn lightweight in its own right.
Local editing
I feel a lot more comfortable writing in Sublime Text, Atom, or even vim compared to WordPress editor. Nuff said.
Moving on
Starting from now, I will slowly mod my own Jekyll theme - something closer to what I like to see and works as I intend it to be. I will also import some of my favourite old blog posts over, and discard those that I think too young too dumb to belong here.
I will also try to write more in different languages, whether it’s Chinese, Malay, or maybe even Cantonese. I feel my Chinese is getting a little too rusty when I try to use Chinese apps and read Chinese technology articles like this, this, and this. Not to mention I have failed an interview by a company based in Shanghai early this year - simply because I could hardly understand their proper Chinese accent.