Our new blog is a lesson in controlling our own infrastructure.

Oct 20, 2020 • 1 min read

Notice anything different? We’ve moved to a new blogging system, welcome! It’s more than twice as fast, aligns with our values by protecting your privacy, and most importantly is a better place to learn about our work.

System	Performance	Accessibility	Best practices	SEO
Old	27	93	86	100
New (Mobile)	94	100	100	100
New (desktop)	95	100	100	100

Table 1. Scores measured using Google’s Lighthouse through developer tools and the homepages of the new and old blog.

We used to host our blog on Medium. They were once one of the best places to blog, but they never shared our values. Increasingly they were trying to funnel our content behind a paywall. It would be fair to say, we’re not massive fans of paywalls 😉.

Now our blog is hosted by Ghost.io. They’re a non-profit, like us. They’re open source, like us. They protect users' privacy, like us. They care about speed and ease, like us. They’re a better fit. In short, we learned a lesson that so much of academia is now learning: open and community-owned infrastructure is critical.

This update to our blog is symbolic of similar improvements we’re making across all our sites and tools - more on that soon.

While you wait, it’s now much easier to see posts more than a couple of years old, so now you can scroll down all the way to the post that started it all and everything that’s come since.