Over the past week or so, I’ve been browsing WordPress themes over the web. Now, I’ve never been completely satisfied with WordPress. While its dashboard is great when you need to get a blog started, I’ve been finding it increasingly stifling — themes are opaque, the post editor is limiting (needs more Emacs!), and I have a general distaste for the large soup of tags generated for each page.
Today I foolishly tried a new theme, thinking that I could easily revert to my highly mangled Twenty-Fourteen theme at any time. Alas, it appears all the customizations were gone when I tried to do exactly that. Luckily, the new theme (Wilson by Anders Noren) is quite to my liking, and I only had to tweak a few things. I also learnt to create child themes in order to avoid losing my settings in the future.
Still, I feel like it is high time for me to move away from WordPress and its pre-made themes, to a simple static website with my own versioned assets. Jekyll looks like the clear winner — it would be well integrated into my current workflow of simple static HTML and CSS, and it would be easily uploaded on GitHub (automatic backup FTW!). Although I don’t have that many pages up, the idea of migrating all the pages and the posts is slightly daunting, so the migration of the blog will probably occur over a few weeks.
In the meantime, any brokenness on the website is due to the theme switching and will be resolved shortly 🙂