Hello World!

I've been contemplating restarting my website for a while, and since I've been doing more work with MKDocs and containers at work, I took the plunge and set up this site. Previously, I was using a WordPress site, which I intend to keep running for a bit and slowly move over here. I have not decided if I will move the old posts over or just import them into a WordPress.com site to host the pages in perpetuity. I have also looked at options that would migrate the posts from WordPress over to Markdown and post them here. But it depends on how much I can get pulled from my current site and if it seems to be worth the effort. Either way, I hope to start utilizing this a lot more and document the process I use to set up the site and other projects I'm working on. One big change is there will be a lot less personal family stuff posted here; I'll move most of that to other forms of social media.

For the host, I'm using GitLab Pages. I have slowly started to move more and more code there as I really like their feature set. I know most of the world uses GitHub for hosting code and sites, but I had a lot of experience with GitLab from my previous employer, so the transition was easy.

If you've never used Material for MKDocs, I highly recommend it. There are lots of other static site generators out there -- and they may even be better suited for your needs -- but being Python-based, fully supporting Markdown for all of the writing, and offering a dead-simple approach to managing everything with a single YAML file, it was hard to resist. Material started out as a theme for MKDocs, -- which in turn was an evolution of ReadTheDocs -- meaning these are geared primarily towards writing documentation. There is ample support for writing great documentation, but you can also just use it as a blogging platform as well. This setup can be tricky, but once you get everything set just right, there is not much to change or update. Since it's all Python under the hood, the support is pretty broad, and GitLab Pages doesn't charge for static sites that are generated. It's a really great option if you want to get set up. I'm publishing my setup so that anyone interested in setting up their own version can steal as needed, and I plan on doing a more official write-up on the process later. For now, I'm just excited to get started on this as a new project and see where it takes me. The best part is that since the content is all just text files and all open source, I can truly take my content anywhere, even just host it on a home server, and the cost should stay extremely low while being easy to migrate. No more WordPress exports!