Moving Gaya Design to Gaya Ninja Blog
Since 2008 I’ve been blogging with the name “Gaya Design”. Which is pretty weird since I am not even blogging about design and am not professionally a designer. It was time to make a move to a different domain and operate with a new name.
I am very proud to introduce to you: Gaya Ninja Blog.
##I am not a designer Ever since my blog took off I felt like I was stuck with the name I once choose to host my blog on. Even before gayadesign.com was a blog I kind of struggled with the name. It’s a name I made up a long time ago when I started getting into web design.
At that time I didn’t even know whether I’d go with a design or development career. I really liked both at the time, but went with development pretty soon, and I am glad I made that choice.
When I finally found the time to do something about this problem I began re-branding small parts of my online presence. My Twitter account has been renamed to @GayaNinja for a while now and I launched a website for my personal / professional profile at http://gaya.ninja.
##New looks The looks of Gaya Ninja Blog are not that different from what Gaya Design looked like. The logo is the same, and I basically use the same colours. I did change the layout and typography, making it more fluid using a grid system.
I believe that the new looks convey my message in a better and more readable way.
##Going static WordPress has been my blog engine on Gaya Design, but it felt like I was using it for the wrong reasons. I don’t like admin panels, configuring stuff in what seem to be endless forms and writing in a WYSIWYG editor.
Static website generators have become more popular over time, and since they come so close to front-end development work I took the plunge and dug into different generator.
The cool thing now is that I can write my posts in the editor I work mostly in and it’s blazing fast. No need for sluggish dynamic web pages to write my content in, but plain text in combination with Markdown.
##No traditional shared hosting One of the reasons I wanted to make something new was to experience deployment of applications in a very different way. Most shared hosting services just have simple FTP deployment and don’t support any custom packages you might want to use.
I wanted an environment where I could deploy code to and it would build and run my application, in my case my blog.
Writing my posts in static files also means I can add them to my git repository, making it an awesome way to see how a post evolved and not having to sync a local and remote database for my data.
##How I switched You can read about how I switched from WordPress to a static website in another article called Migrating from WordPress to Wintersmith.
##Let me know what you think I’d love to hear what you think about the new blog. If you have any suggestions you can tell my on Twitter or use my contact form.