My new site Michael.team launches today!

Today is the day when I’m finally launching my new home page. I know, who cares about a “home page” anymore in 2020? Well, I do, and below I’m going to explain to you, why I do care so much about it. Anyway, new blog, new address, new technology, lots of new things. Here are the details:

• New domain - Michael.team
• New content - in three languages!
• Old content… will be migrated soon!
• New technology - Jekyll and GitHub Pages
• New speed, new tech and vanilla JavaScript
• New design, dark mode and learning CSS
• New writing flow on the iPad
• New license - it’s all open source now
• So WHY do I care about my new site so much?

New domain - Michael.team

My name is Michael Sliwinski. To be exact, in Polish it’s Michał Śliwiński. It’s not an easy name to spell out or remember.

I mean the first part is easy. Michael. There’s a Michael in every language. Michał, Miguel, Michel… easy. But my last name is very Polish. Even with a typical Polish “ski” ending.

So while I was very proud of getting my last name’s domain name Sliwinski.com back in the day, it wasn’t something I could easily just spell out easily outside of Poland.

When the domains opened to many different variations I snatched the Michael.team domain just because I could. And now that we’ve just launched Nozbe Teams and I’m all about team productivity, this just fits.

So michael.team it is.

And I love how short and snappy it is:

Just visit Michael DOT team :-)

New content - in three languages!

Nozbe is a global company. That’s why my main working language has always been English and my old site was written only in English. I always wanted to have more languages, but didn’t feel like translating everything I write.

However, I do speak English, Polish, Spanish and German. And I give interviews, make appearances and write articles in at least three of these languages. So I wanted to have a place where I could post all these things in all these languages.

Sometimes there might also be something that will be translated to two or all of these languages, like my webinar on Nozbe Teams - it’s in English, Spanish and Polish.

So anyway, multi-language site it is and it brings me joy.

Old content… will be migrated soon!

For now I’m leaving Sliwinski.com as is, but over the next few months I’ll migrate all the content from there to here. In theory it’s fairly easy as I’ve been writing in Markdown for all these years and I keep writing like this in here. But still, these are more than 1000 posts and I want to migrate the content properly so it’ll take me a little bit of time to get around to it.

Once stuff is migrated, I’ll redirect all traffic from sliwinski.com to here.

New technology - Jekyll and GitHub Pages

This site is a fresh start. Years ago I wrote a static blog generator called “Zenlous” and we used it for both Nozbe site and my blog. And it was great. But we weren’t developing it and it stagnated. While other systems blossomed. The Nozbe site is now built using Hugo and for this site I chose Jekyll which I personally like better and I love the fact that I can just publish it using Github Pages.

I’ve been tweaking Jekyll for the last few months, learning it and playing with it. It’s just a joy to use for a geek like me. I had to learn a lot about it to tweak it to my liking and I’ll be sharing more details over the next months.

New speed, new tech and vanilla JavaScript

The site now loads really fast. The previous one wasn’t slow, but this one is even faster. By a long shot. Also, I have a perfect excuse to learn some new modern vanilla JavaScript. No frameworks. No fuss. Just fast JS. I’m not using it much. Today it’s only on my now page but in the future I’ll be introducing “infinite scrolling” to my main page and some other goodies. The site will still work without JS no problem.

I’m excited about it because I love programming but I’m not the world’s best programmer. I was good enough to write the first version of Nozbe in 2007 but now I’m hiring brilliant programmers to help me out. And they don’t let me code so I needed a playground like my site to do some coding!

New design, dark mode and learning CSS

The design is also much more minimal. I got inspired by Derek Sivers. My design is not THAT minimal, but it’s pretty simple anyway.

I played a lot with CSS (again, geek in me had some fun!) and managed to create these pretty title headers for blog posts and pages (just like in this post). I’m also compressing my graphics very hard to make sure the page still loads fast. Especially on mobile devices.

This new design supports dark mode. I’m a big fan of dark mode and use it on all my devices: iPad, iPhone and even iMac. This page detects and adapts to your device’s settings. And in dark mode it’s using pitch black as background which some people don’t like all that much but I really dig it.

New writing flow on the iPad

Now with this setup I have a perfect writing environment on my iPad. As you know, I’m #iPadOnly - meaning I do most of my work on the iPad. Now I can publish on this site easily using the iPad, too.

I wrote about this setup earlier and now I’m using it here. I really enjoy posting directly from my iPad, writing posts in iA Writer, coding in Textastic, publishing it to GitHub using WorkingCopy.

I’m extensively using “Siri Shortcuts” to make this process even easier. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll be sharing my Shortcuts/Workflows in later posts.

New license - it’s all open source now

Yes, I got inspired by Leo Babauta who basically uncopyrighted his blog.

I’m doing something similar - but I’m using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license which basically means, you can copy any part of this web site, any blog post, any entry, any piece of HTML, CSS or JS code and just use it. You can even modify it and even for commercial purposes.

And as I’ll be migrating my old posts, they’ll all automatically will be re-published using this license.

All I ask is return is a credit and hopefully a link back to the site. I trust you’ll do that.

But that’s it, no need to ask me for permission. Just copy stuff and credit me. That’s it.

So WHY do I care about my new site so much?

Because I like writing and I hate it that when you post on social media, things just disappear. It’s hard to find them, link to them, refer back to them.

I love it that there’s a place on the Internet where I can just write and later link back to it, and as I’ve been blogging for the last 12+ years, I want to keep doing just that.

I’m old-school this way. I believe in real blogging more than posting on social media.