Welcome folks, if you are reading this via the mike.lowen.co.nz then congratulations you are visiting the new version of my site powered by Jekyll hosted on GitHub Pages. I made this move because I realised that my blogging needs don’t require a full blown blog engine/cms and Jekyll suited my needs quite nicely, also that I was paying for VPS from Host4Geeks which aside from the site I was not utilising at all but still paying for. While I’m at it I would like to thank Host4Geeks for looking after me for the last couple of years, their service has always been top notch and I wouldn’t hesitate in recommending them to anyone looking for a hosting provider.

When I built the old version of the site it was largely to teach myself Ruby on Rails and at the time I full intended on building upon that base to enable a whole slew of other features, time being what it is I never got around to doing so. With moving to a new platform that supported some of the features that I wanted it gave me some opportunities to update the site, some of the changes which were made are:

• New social icons by Lee Gargano which I think fit the feel of the site better.
• New static pages about and projects.
• The site now reacts better when viewed on smaller devices, the recent articles and recent journal entries swap to be horizontal which makes reading easier and the navigation links now collapse into a side menu.
• You can now comment on articles, this is powered by Disqus.

When I originally re-launched this site I decided to make mike.lowen.co.nz the canonical URL for all of my content but still expose it via my original mlowen.com domain, with this new site I’ve taken a further step towards deprecating the mlowen.com domain by changing it to now just redirect through to mike.lowen.co.nz.

If you are finding any issues with the site feel free to leave a comment, submit an issue or better yet open a pull request.