From Wordpress to al-folio

My former Wordpress website actually looked quite nice in my opinion (I even bought the Graphy Pro theme, which is the one you see on the image), and it was certainly easy to maintain my website content and add new blog posts and other content. There are however some reasons why I have decided to migrate to a different setup. Currently, I envision my website as a combination of digital business card and simple blog. This use case already allows me to showcase my views and work, and for this a static webpage that can load in documents and media is enough. On the other hand, I do not need most of the fancy features Wordpress offers, and therefore they are unneccesary luggage to me.

I have decided to switch to al-folio, which is a simple academics-oriented theme for Jekyll. It looks nice and clean makes it easy to adjust or add content if you’re okay with using markdown files for content creation and website configuration. It fits my current use case perfectly, even though I might adjust the theme in the longer run. Nevertheless, moving away from Wordpress also have two other advantages: Firstly, it gets rid of the junk people would hurl at me through the messages via the unused comment section function, and the bloated plugin ecosystem. I’ve yet to find out whether having an al-folio website reduces spam received to zero, but I’m certain it reduces it by a lot. Secondly, the webpage loads faster since it reduces website complexity, e.g. by removing all that php stuff I didn’t really need.