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Hello, dear reader! Just a heads up that this article is deprecated and (probably) not worthy of your time. You are, of course, very welcome to read it — but I personally consider it to be outdated / irrelevant / embarrassing, and have removed it from my blog archive listings. Really, it’s only still here to stop old links from breaking. You have been warned!

Siteleaf

Article illustration for Siteleaf

Back in June 2010 (bloody hell, that was four years ago!), I moved my site's backend over from self-hosted WordPress to Harmony, the CMS created by my friend Steve Smith. And although Harmony has continued to be a joy to use and extremely reliable after it was sold to Collective Idea (when Steve joined GitHub), it's now time for me to move on. So, I'm pleased to announce that this site is now powered by Oak Studios’wonderful CMS Siteleaf.

The great thing about Siteleaf is that it generates static files, so it's extremely fast and the site can live on even if the backend goes down, or I decide to swap CMSs again. Only the admin lives on Siteleaf's servers — you can host the rendered files wherever you like. That said, I've chosen to use their hosting as well, as their CDN setup is lightning-fast.

Switching CMSs is rarely a pleasant task, but Skylar and his team have been so, so, so helpful in getting me set up, and will soon be blogging about how they ported over my theme. Because both Siteleaf and Harmony use the Liquid templating language, it's been relatively easy for me to get my head around the code, and although the site's design currently remains unchanged as of today, I'm working on a redesign that should go live this summer. (Famous last words.)

For those interested, the reason I switched from Harmony after four years was the relatively expensive monthly cost ($60 because I had three live sites using it) and the lack of product development since it was acquired.

Hope you're enjoying the new speeds.