Welcome to my new website! It’s been rebuilt to be faster, more responsive, and more secure.
The Works page is still the mainstay of the site, where you can read about my published works and find Amazon purchase links.
My old Wordpress site finally got hacked. I was able to clean it up and recover it, but that was the incentive to finally move away from Wordpress. This new site is a static site generated using Hugo. There’s no server-side execution environment (PHP, Ruby, CGI, etc.) and no database, so there’s not really anything that can get hacked. Static content is also way faster compared to the old PHP/MariaDB environment running on a cheap shared host.
Hugo is a pretty neat system, but it isn’t a traditional content management system so you need some low-level web developer experience to use it. I was a web developer in a former life, so it’s been fun to get back into it. I really appreciate having complete control and flexibility with individual page design compared to using something like Wordpress. And yet it still gives you the ability to define data in a single place (for example, all info on the books I’ve written) and reference it anywhere in the site. It’s like 1990’s web development, but modernized.
The big downside is there’s nothing in the website that allows it to change once hosted. That makes it very secure, but it means making changes–including adding new posts–requires editing the site locally and then re-publishing to the web server. This is not a big deal in my case, but might be awkward for fast-moving sites with a large team of editors.
Take a look around and let me know if you see any issues.