The OpenScan Blog has moved (and is nicer to read now)

I’m happy to welcome you to the new OpenScan blog!

We moved the OpenScan blog to a new home: blog.openscan.eu and changed it from a Shopify blog to a Jekyll-based static site.

Why we moved

Though Shopify is a great platform, it is not ideal for our blogging needs. We needed a simple, yet powerful, blog system which handles technical content well. Shopify is just built for other use cases, and it was complicated for us to use and needed a lot of manual work for every post.

With the new setup we can:

• edit posts as plain Markdown
• use fancy stuff like $\LaTeX$ for pretty math
• keep changes in Git
• remove friction which kept us from publishing ;)

We promised at the beginning of this year that we wanted to be more communcative about OpenScan and its future. The new blog is a step in that direction.

What’s new?

We hope that you like the new layout and design and find it easier to read too!

There are some quality of life improvements like a dark mode, proper tagging and categorization and a responsive layout for mobile devices.

Some older posts are marked with an archive note. Those articles are still useful as project history, but they may describe older hardware, older software, or workflows that have changed since publication.

If you notice a broken link, missing image, or odd formatting issue, please let us know.

Thanks to Jekyll and Chirpy

This new version is built with Jekyll and the Chirpy theme.

Jekyll gives us a simple static-site workflow that fits the blog well: posts are files, builds are reproducible, and the generated site is easy to deploy. Chirpy provides a solid base theme with the navigation, archives, tags, search, responsive layout, and dark mode already handled cleanly.

We adjusted the theme to better match OpenScan, but the foundation is still Chirpy. Thanks to everyone for maintaining these open-source tools.