I’ve given all my websites a face lift over the holidays. It was time for a new “look” as I’d been tweaking the same WordPress theme for over 4 years.

The biggest change to my sites is actually under the hood, as I’ve moved from my old content management system to Jekyll. Jekyll is the engine behind GitHub Pages, which I’ve been using to run some of my Web projects – but not my blogs – for the past year and a half.

I’ve really enjoyed using GitHub Pages to power these projects, in no small part because I can add new sections to my site without having to ask for the IT Department’s help. (That is, Kin’s.) The big thing for me: I don’t have to worry about setting up a database, something that’s always been a big obstacle hindering me from fully managing my content via a traditional CMS.

As I have added more projects to my sites, I’ve come to realize that the traditional notion of “blog” doesn’t really meet my needs any longer. Rather, I’m not sure that presenting all my writing in reverse-chronological order makes much sense. I’ve got several different kinds of writing – my weekly news roundups, my essays, the transcripts from my talks, my books. I want to be able to highlight each of these and not have them buried under several pages of blog posts. I’m still working on the best way to do this, but I feel like the redesign, which uses the Mediator theme, is a solid step in that direction.

There are likely to be some bugs and some broken links. You can send me an email, give me a shout on Twitter, or heck, file an issue on GitHub in order to let me know.