✱ The Move to Statamic
I’m not a web developer. That was reinforced this past week as I attempted to move this site to a static platform. It wasn’t easy, but having friends that are always willing to come to your rescue helps. A lot.
Moving sucks, but it’s worth it
The move to a static blog was tough, but I learned a ton. And in the end, it was fun, but I wouldn’t have been able to do it without some serious help. This post isn’t meant to give you a blow-by-blow accounting of switching, but instead to thanks some folks that are… well… awesome. If you want to know why I left Squarespace, Harry Marks’ piece nails it.
With a little help from my friends
Harry Marks and Erik Hess never told me to shut up when they endured my whining for help. They were both kind enough to share key components of their code so I could learn how Statamic’s structure worked. This was absolutely invaluable. Erik even kindly helped me with some CSS that had me baffled, and in the end helped me get exactly where I wanted to go. These guys are tops. I refer to them as my Statamic-spirit-guides.
Max Jacobson wrote an awesome script that converted Squarespace’s poor export to one that wasn’t only compatible with Statamic, but reformatted a messy XML file to individual Markdown posts. This was probably the most instrumental part of the process.
Douwe Maan helped me get off the ground with some code. I had been struggling for a few hours on the navigation portions of the site, and he fixed it in minutes. He too, is an ace.
Zackary Corbett always amazes me. I’m pretty sure he’s younger than my oldest son, but is always able to help me out with things that fly over my head. He gave me a hand with some server issues on my new host, A Small Orange. While he wasn’t able to get it going, I still appreciate his attempt. It was far more than I could do on my own. In the end, it was a problem on ASO’s end, and I switched hosts. Once I finally got the site up and running, Zack was super helpful squashing bugs before it even propagated for me.
The moral of the story is, when you need help, ask for it. There are always tons of people willing to help out when you need it. This week was a shining example of that for me.
A little housekeeping
All in all, I’m happy with the rewrite of the site. I still plan to tinker, but it has pretty much everything it did before. You’ll notice sponsorships are gone. This is intentional. While every sponsor I had here was great, I didn’t feel like it was paying off for them or the site. I have some new ideas for running sponsorships here, and I’ll have those details soon. I think it will be better for everyone involved.
As for the RSS feed, you may need to resubscribe. With some help from Maxime Valette of uri.lv, I think I’ve migrated it, but if it’s not working for you, you can find a link in the site’s navigation. If you’re searching for something, there’s a DuckDuckGo search box in the footer. Have at it. Thanks for reading, and thanks for sticking with me and enabling me to rebuild the site. It’s worth it because of you guys.