Redesigning Symmetrycode

I just moved from Bluehost to Digital Ocean (for reasons outlined below), and also started on a redesign for Symmetrycode.

As of now, 31st October, Symmetrycode’s redesign is a work in progress. There are many things left to do, and I’ll be using this post as a todo.

Here’s a short, quick, un-proofread post about my experiences and my reasons for doing what I did.

Moving to Digital Ocean

I moved primarily because of three reasons:

• It’s cheap, around $10/year cheaper than Bluehost (Enough for a domain).
• I get SSH access and the interface is primarily through the terminal. A good excuse for finally learning the command line
• It’s fast. Seriously fast.

Apart from that, I find Digital Ocean to have better support and a better UI as well! (Full disclosure: Affiliate link).

Moving was pretty much painless. Took my some time to wrap my head around how apache and mysql work in the command line, but I managed to install PHPMyAdmin and apache commands are comitted to muscle memory by now.

WIP: Symmetrycode

I moved Symmetrycode to Octopress. Why? Because no database!

The WP to Octopress importer was pretty decent. I had to move images manually (Which was painless due to my frequent backups), and had to work with the weird YAML matter generated by posts, but everything was easier than I expected.

Still, there’s a LOT left to work on Symmetrycode for now. I managed to build a decent-ish theme for the main blog, but currently it’s desktop only. Here’s what I’ve left, I might be missing a few things though.

• Make it responsive.
• Archive and category pages.
• Open graph tags, Twitter tags, etc.
• Fixing issues in older posts.
• Purging outdated or useless posts.

I hope to get it all done as soon as I can, but unfortunately, as of now, I cannot dedicate much time to my blog.

The whole journey was pretty neat.