A few changes

I’ve removed the commenting from the website and deactivated the Disqus plug-in. If any discussion or commenting happens with regards to what I share here, it always happens off-site; either via email, twitter, or the best of all, real life. For an already glacial website the performance penalty isn’t really worth it. To compensate I’ll create a more findable contact method (it’s hidden now so I’m not forced to reply to but the most dedicated communicators).

And speaking of performance, while I don’t have the time at present, I think I’ll be looking into other methods of content management. I don’t imagine I’ll go back to using Movabletype but I’ve been inspired each time I hear the engineers from Forestry.io talk about flat file websites and their performance benefits. Since my templates are decidedly simple, importing all the posts intact might be the greatest challenge, especially since I seem to muck it up each time I have tried to migrate data from one system to another.

My usage of WordPress here is very vanilla and doesn’t require much thought on my part. But a recent experience with a wonderful freelancer who I hired to create another website for me has renewed my hatred for such heavy handed approaches to publishing. She used a theme that would make an excellent case study of all the things you can do wrong in user interface design. It’s attempts at hiding the WordPress UI and code obfuscated the whole process, making it slow and painful. But apparently clients like it.