From WordPress.com to Starlight

Well, after a lot of consideration and playing with different ways of doing this site, I’ve finally made the DNS changes to move from WordPress.com to Starlight.

Why Starlight?

• It’s fast. Really fast.
• The basic navigation around pages is automatic once set up, and there’s a sidebar with a table of contents automatically too.
• I want to write more ‘timeless’ stuff, not blog posts that mostly disappear in time. WordPress is, at heart, a blog. Starlight is for documentation. That feels like it fits better.
• It’s got some geeky stuff to play with. I write in Nova, push changes to GitHub, and they appear live about a minute later.
• Making old posts that had been linked to from other sites appear at the same URLs turned out to be quite easy, so I don’t break anyone else’s links.

There are drawbacks - the blogging plugin is a bit rudimentary, but it’ll do the job for now, and will likely improve later. I won’t be able to do the fancy photo-heavy layouts I used to do, but I haven’t done any of those in years. And I don’t think anyone missed them.

And I’m missing a Flickr logo for the social links. But I can either request that, or maybe try to learn how to do a pull request and add it myself. Bit beyond me right now, but I’d love to think I’d actually been able to contribute something, even if it’s a very minor something.