When I first created this blog over a year ago, I wanted something quick, dirty, and free (QDAF). So Jekyll hosted on GitHub with the shell of bootstrap it was. In my rush, I hastenly clicked create random repository name on Github which landed me with drunken-ironman. I rolled with it because I was in a rush, but since then creating random repository names or codenames for my repositories has kind of become my thing.

Since that first year of this blog, it went on to become one of the top 150 sites in the country. Well…not exactly. What actually happened is I posted a few times and never touched this thing again. I’ll admit, not a great start. But then something happened. Something that I promised myself would never happen again. I forked this blogs repository from Github after seeing a post about how to make sprites in css that I wanted to try out. After I created my sprite I kept messing around until I hooked myself into revamping mattsheehan.

The revamping started with creating a css grid framework, which the beginnings of are used on this site and will soon be an independent repository on Github. I wanted something like bootstrap or any of the other hundreds of grid frameworks but without all the weight. Something light, portable, can be built from as a starting point for other sites. The framework’s no where near where I want it to be, but it’s a better start than before.

I’m starting to learn the in’s and out’s of Jekyll as well. But I don’t love it. It’s where this blog lives for now but as I start implementing the future of my projects this site will probably move to Ghost. The benefits of Ghost you ask compared to Jekyll? Well heres a few.

1. Ghost uses Node.js. Jekyll’s backend is Ruby. I prefer to mess with Node.js.

2. Ghost at least uses sqlite. Jekyll uses no database, just flat files. Which is no harder to manage until after you reach the point where you have more than five posts (which we are approaching!). Sqlite is not hard. It’s a nice little database perfect for blogs. Jekyll just has more baggage.

3. I like that Jekyll uses liquid html templating. Ghost also uses something similiar. Ok fine we’ll call this one a draw.

4. Jekyll does not fit well with Windows. I’ve had such a terrible time with installing it on Windows that I don’t even have Jekyll on my computer. I just code, push to Github, and hope it works. No testing. This blog is in constant production.

5. Even Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror has switched his blog to Ghost. By the way, Jeff Atwood is the guy who made Stack Exchange.

So there that’s it. Mattsheehan is going to stay my bloggin platform, one way or another. If you ever check out Bitwhisp, that’s cool as well, but I don’t have the blogging stamina to manage two similar sites.