I'm very pleased to announce a new version of Ryan Tell's website, which was designed from the ground-up to celebrate his recently-released EP. Take a look around and let me know what you think.
For those who might be interested in some of the technical details:
I ditched Wordpress for Jekyll, and I haven't looked back. The migration was pretty simple considering that we didn't have a lot of material to work with in the first place, but I think this will provide Ryan with a better platform to keep the world updated on what kind of music he's been working on. There's no doubt about it: static websites are making a comeback.
I developed a bit of jQuery code that allows content to be loaded dynamically, so that viewers can browse the site without interrupting music that's played on the sidebar, for example. The result of that work can be found on in one of my Github repositories.
As far as I know, no one is doing something quite like that with Jekyll. I do hope that some people migrate toward that code and start to come up with other was to make Jekyll more flexible. Just because we lose the database doesn't mean we have to lose all the functionality that was built up around them. The only thing that would make Jekyll absolutely perfect is the ability to hook a WYSIWYG editor into the creation of posts or editing of existing static pages. A simple function to convert human-formatted text into Markdown, or right into HTML, would be all that it takes. I'd like to work that up myself (and perhaps I will, someday), but I'm kind of busy with that whole podcast thing.
More on that soon. Really soon. I promise.