Hello, Kirby!

It's been a long time in coming, but I'm excited to be finally relaunching Techinch.com and writing on here again after an extremely long hiatus. Major changes take time, and this one definitely has, but it should definitely be for the better!

After starting out blogging on WordPress.com, moving to self-hosted WordPress was the obvious next step when I wanted to do more with my site. WordPress is still a great CMS, and it keeps getting better each year. The only problem is, it's complex. I never could feel like I really knew how to dig into its guts and change things I wanted to change. When I wanted a more flexible site design, I switched to WooThemes Canvas and designed a semi-unique without touching almost any code. That's nice and easy, but it's not what I wanted. I could have taken the time to learn more of the code-side of WordPress, but even though I know the WordPress admin screens inside and out, creating my own themes and plugins seemed too complex.

Over time, my writing workflow had changed as well. I started out blogging with Windows Live Writer back when I used a PC. I then started writing directly in the rich text editor in WordPress, before switching to using the WordPress HTML editor more often. Now, I typically write in Markdown-formatted plain text in iA Writer, export my post to HTML, and paste it in WordPress to publish. I wanted a way to write directly in Markdown and use plain text files in a CMS I could understand and customize as I wanted.

Enter Kirby. It's one of the simplest ways to create a site you could imagine. WordPress boasts a 5 minute install, but Kirby really delivers. Actually, if you have Git on your server, you could have a new, basic Kirby site deployed in under a minute. It's just plain files, so your pages and articles can be written in markdown-formatted plain text, and your theme can be coded with an incredibly simple API. I can't remember how I initially discovered Kirby, but once I saw how simple it was to use, I knew I wanted to move my site to it.

Moving from WordPress to Kirby was easier than I expected, thanks to the Kirby WordPress exporter. Before switching, I imported all of the comments on Techinch to Disqus, though I didn't add Disqus to my new theme because I thought I'd give it a try having no comments for now at least. I also kept my old wp-content folder in the top of my site directory so old images in articles still work as before. Then, since I wanted a fully new theme, I took quite a bit longer playing with CSS and PHP to get a theme working like I wanted. It's still a work in progress, but I think it's good enough now to get back to writing, and I'll keep tweaking it over time. I also wanted to switch to a VPS so I could use Dropbox to sync files to Techinch (another awesome feature of a file-based CMS like Kirby), but that proved too much to bite off at once. One thing at a time.

For now, Techinch is powered by:

• Kirby - The amazing markdown flat-file CMS that's turning plain text files into everything you see on here.
• Dreamhost - Shared hosting thats honestly worked quite good for me.
• iA Writer - The best (in my opinion) focused Markdown writing app, which I'm using to write all articles I publish, here and at AppStorm.
• Sublime Text - The code editor I use to write/edit any CSS/HTML/PHP and other code files on Techinch and elsewhere.
• Transmit - The truck that, um, transmits my freshly pinned articles to the server to be published.
• Adobe Source Sans Pro - The font I'm using (in both light and regular weights) for all of the typography on Techinch, via Google Fonts.
• Influads - The ad network that helps support Techinch with stylish ads about great tech products and services.

The best thing about switching to Kirby has been the great community that's already formed around the new CMS. Bastian Alleger, the developer behind Kirby, and Niklaus Gerber, the designer behind some of the best Kirby themes released so far, have both been very helpful in getting my site switched to Kirby, so I'd like to take a second to say Thanks to both of them!

With that, it's time to get back to writing. Expect to see a lot more articles published here going forward. Thanks for reading, and stay tuned for more to come!

Thoughts? @reply me on Twitter.