<p>Good programmers are supposed to be lazy, right? The way I interpret this statement - because none of the software engineers who I know could be considered lazy - is that we like to automate repetitive tasks. You know, tasks like checking if you’ve made any changes to your blog and then building the blog and deploying the changes automatically. Which is what I’ve done, and in this post I’ll show you my minimalist setup to do so.</p>

<p>Right, if you and your RSS reader can read this, the first stage of the migration of my blog to a static site has successfully completed and you’re now reading the new site. There’s still some more tweaking to do, but I broke it up into multiple milestones to minimise the overall risk of the migration.</p>

<p>One “biggie” that was holding up this blog’s migration to a static site was getting a comments system up and running, followed by importing the existing comments. I had picked <a href="https://posativ.org/isso/docs/">Isso</a> a while back as it allows for easy import of existing comments from WordPress. I really didn’t want to depend on a third party comment hosting service like Disqus. I also didn’t want to use Staticman, mainly because it has dependencies on…

<p>Now that I’ve got the static site up and running, it’s obviously time to switch over immediately, right? Not to fast. After QA’ing my deployment process in production, it was time to check how the two compared from a performance perspective. I like to use several different tests, starting with <a href="https://tools.pingdom.com/">Pingdom</a>, then using <a href="https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/">PageSpeed Insights</a> for more details.</p>

<p>Straight from the “make work for yourself because there aren’t enough hours in the day already” files.</p>

<p>My apologies for the sudden instability of my blog. I’ve managed to make a hash of an update on the main Wordpress site when trying to update to a newer PHP version and had to switch to the Jekyll “backup” site that isn’t quite production ready yet.</p>

<p>Unfortunately, Digg announced that Digg Reader is shutting down tomorrow. While I never used Digg Reader as my main RSS feed reader – I’ve got a paid subscription to <a href="https://feedly.com/">Feedly</a> – I was very happy to use it as a backup reader for those feeds that weren’t always that great at adhering to the RSS feed standard (I’m looking at you, <a href="https://bringatrailer.com/">bringatrailer.com</a>) as it was more forgiving when it parsed feeds.…

<p>I’ve been experimenting with converting this blog to <a href="http://jekyllrb.com/">Jekyll</a> or another static blog generator. I’m sticking with Jekyll at the moment due to its ease of use and its plugin environment. The main idea behind this is to reduce the resource consumption and hopefully also speed up the delivery of the blog. In fact, there is a <a href="http://static.lonecpluspluscoder.com/">static version of the blog</a> available right now, even though it’s kinda…

<p>I switched jobs in October last year and getting up to speed in the new role did take priority over anything else, so I had to put a few other endeavours including this blog on hold for a little while.</p>

<p>Another metablogging post, but this may come in handy for people who like to produce blog posts in bulk and schedule them for publication in WordPress at a later date.</p>