Over the course of a little less than a week, I migrated this blog from WordPress 3.8 to Jekyll. I used WordPress for years, probably since 2005 or 2006 when I switched away from Movable Type. I finally decided I wanted something more lightweight than WordPress, and in particular I wanted a blog that would load faster. Jekyll gives me both of those. The part that took the longest to migrate was customizing the new layout, based on Dbyll, and formatting the code examples in my posts.

Today at work I set up a WordPress install on CentOS Linux so that it could send email. It’s pretty useful and almost required to have this working, since if you forget your password, WordPress needs to send you an email to reset it. That’s how I discovered mail wasn’t set up correctly, actually: a user tried to reset their password and WordPress gave an error about “email could not be sent”, and no email was received. Fortunately it was pretty easy to fix.

Using the Events Manager WordPress plugin at work, I noticed that the event tag archive pages showed only current and upcoming events with a given tag. I wanted them to show all events, including past events, with the tag. I made a custom loop to accomplish this, within the Genesis framework. Create a file called taxonomy-event-tags.php in your Genesis child theme:

I had the idea earlier of displaying a pie chart of my blog’s categories, but didn’t see any WordPress plugins out there to do that. “Well, fine, I’ll write my own!” I thought — so I did. I submitted it for review to be listed on the WordPress plugins site but while it’s under review, you can download it from my Github page.

I’m going to New Jersey for the first time for work, and I’ll be up there about two and a half weeks. I was asked last week if I’d come along to help with the requirements gathering process for a new project, and I agreed, though I may freeze my tail off. There’s a lot of flying involved because we’ll be coming back to Lexington over the weekends, and we’ll be flying out of Cincinnati instead of Lexington. I’m borrowing a huge suitcase from a coworker since my one medium-sized suitcase won’t cut it for a week-long stay–you can tell I don’t travel much. I doubt I’ll have much time for sight-seeing since we’re doing eight-hour work days, but we’ll probably get to try some good Jersey food: we’ll do lunches with the client and I’ll get dinner with my coworkers.