I’ve been pretty busy over the past few weeks for one reason or another. Exam marking and other administration has been very intense, and Mr. Bsag had to go in for planned surgery on his foot, which generated a bit of domestic upheaval. Things have calmed down a bit more now, and I’ve had time to finish my spring clean of this site. If it has worked, things should look a bit different around here.

I’ll write more about the process in a separate post, but the short story is that I switched from Octopress to Pelican, and in the process, did a big redesign and restructure of the site, cleaning up a few niggling issues that I had never bothered to sort out before. I didn’t move out of any specific dissatisfaction with Octopress: I thought — and still think — that Octopress is most complete and beautiful static blogging framework out there. However, I have a large number of articles (1482 to date, including this one), and Pelican is simply much faster¹ at generating my blog than Octopress. Even that would not be enough to make me move from Octopress were it not for my obsession with tinkering with this site. Regular readers will know that I change the software running this site every few years, sometimes with a good technological excuse, but more often just for the fun of it!

Anyway, I hope you like the new design. I’ll still continue to tweak it because I’ll almost certainly find slightly broken things when I publish it to the live site, so let me know if you find anything broken.