Four Island

Does something look, perhaps, a little different about my website? That's right, I've redesigned my website. Considering that Four Island 3 came out September 22nd, 2011, and that Four Island 2 came out June 13th, 2008, this is an amazing turnaround for me, and I'm very excited about this new incarnation of my website.

Four Island 3 used Wordpress, a very powerful blogging platform that I have admired in the past and which did turn out to be very appropriate for my website. The thing is, ever since realizing, when Four Island 3 came out, that my website badly needed to be simplified, I've been obsessed with this very simplistic ideal. Four Island 3 did not meet that ideal. Wordpress was simply too powerful for my needs. Four Island 4, however, is much simpler and yet, it gives me more control than Four Island 3 did.

Four Island 4 uses Jekyll, a simple, blog-aware, static website generator. It's actually a very cute little concept: you write a few webpages with some template code in them, create a folder for your Markdown-formatted blog posts, and run a command that generates your static site. Whenever your site changes, you run the command again and your site is regenerated. It's not dynamic at all, which is perfect for my increasingly old webserver. It's also incredibly simple, yet cute.

Now, since my website is now static, how am I going to support comments? That's right, I have to use an outside service. "Now, Starla," you may start to ask, worried, "you're not going to use IntenseDebate, are you? You know how that usually turns out!" Hey, now, don't you worry about a thing. I am finally trying out Disqus, which I have seen used by many other static, Jekyll websites. I think it'll work out nicely, especially because it has social media integration, which should promote anonymous commenting, especially since there is no such thing as non-anonymous commenting anymore. :P

The other thing that you may have noticed is that this blog doesn't contain any of my old blog posts. That is true. I've decided to start anew with this blog, and write about eccentric things that are nevertheless less eccentric than the thing I used to blog about. My old blog still exists, though: go back to the home page of this blog and look at the left column.

I'm excited about this new blog, though. As I said earlier, it's so cute! Look how nicely I can include highlighted code segments:

def cats
  omg.shakira "insane"
  10.times do
    puts "hi"
  end
end

Are you excited? I sure am. Welcome to Four Island 4.