Bring on a new scurker.com

14 Dec 2014

Welcome to the redesign and relaunch of scurker.com! It's been far too long in my professional career that I have neglected this site, and felt that a new fresh coat of paint was long overdue.

It's also been three years since I have contributed anything back to the community, and part of the goal for this relaunch is to better share what I know and have learned.

So Long Wordpress!

Wordpress was a good start, but has finally outlived its usefulness and I've moved on to greener pastures. I wanted something much more lightweight and with more friendly editing. I had initially looked at ghost along with a few other blogging platforms, but eventually decided that I didn't want to be encumbered by unnecessary overhead of yet another blog platform.

Hello Wintersmith

Bring on wintersmith, a nodejs static site generator. I don't hate myself, so I also am using wintersmith handlebars over the built in Jade template engine. For my sanity and easier editing I can write every post or page in markdown - which wintersmith will automatically convert.

Dependencies

There's some slightly modified plugins to wintersmith to allow for article to article pagination and a more sensible permalink structure.

No more jQuery

I'm a big fan of jQuery, but I have been slowly moving away from having jQuery as a dependency unless absolutely necessary. So you won't see very much jQuery used here.

Open Sourced

I've learned a lot through open source projects, and have spoken many times about the importance of open source. However, my own blog I kept private and didn't share what I knew. I figured it's time to start putting money where my mouth is and release the source for this site. You can check out everything on github. If you come across any issues, be sure to let me know.