Site News: January 2020 Update

Published: 5 January 2020

In May of 2019 I ended up switching hosting providers on short notice and decided at the same time to stop using WordPress. I wanted to learn HTML and CSS and decided to re-do the site by manually coding it myself as a way to learn. I also had some of the following goals in mind:

I wanted to make the site as fast and simple as possible from a technical standpoint. The idea was to allow the site to run on even older hardware and browser versions, and even older mobile phones if possible.
To that end the site is built using only HTML and CSS. No javascript. No complex back-ends. Just simple code that should load quickly.
I wanted to make the site reasonably mobile-friendly. I still believe the best way to consume the information here is on a large monitor, but with so many folks using mobile and so much of my audience from outside the United States, I thought being mobile-friendly was important.
Lastly, as I've become more privacy aware I wanted to provide a site that ran with no Google tracking, no ads, and no third-party code at all.

As of today, the main transition of this site from WordPress is more or less complete. I am still not including any sort of comments function so any old comments are gone. If there is enough interest, maybe I will set up a Discord server or Slack channel for those who want to discuss Business Analysis.

Most importantly, the objective the wiki portion remains to provide in-depth coverage of the topic discussed. The wiki is NOT the place for quick overview articles. My goal is to provide not only an overview, but step-by-step instructions, history, context, and additional commentary where I feel appropriate.

I still have some items on my to-do list like adding a certificate and enabling HTTPS access, and some tweaks to the design. But those are secondary to the goals I had above and will come in the future.

If you have any feedback, you can still email me at |admin| at |bawiki.com|, without the pipes and replacing 'at' with the symbol.

Transition Timeline

5 January 2020 - All of the blog posts I intend to migrate (all 51) have now been migrated. I did not move some that referred to content that is no longer accessible (for example, the CrossTalk journal that I used to find a lot of content at seems to been discontinued and its site taken over by other group); but the rest should be here. I also simplified the navigation and site structure.
12 August 2019 - All of the major wiki articles have now been re-posted to the site. I left out some placeholder articles that didn't really add anything of value until I can re-write them. Next up I will turn to the blog content.
21 July 2019 - Changed navigation yet again to put all navigation up top and better support full page-width content, and to make navigation more mobile-friendly. Also added more pages back to the wiki. On the privacy front I deleted the Google Analytics account I was using so there should be no more Google tracking on this site.
9 June 2019 - Added a quick blog page with 2 posts because I received an email asking for a specific blog post to be re-added. I also re-added more Wiki pages, including the 'Techniques' overview page. Given that the site is still very much in-progress, feedback of any sort would be welcome!
26 May 2019 - Added 'Wiki Quick-Nav' as a quick navigation option that is responsive-friendly (for now). Also added the following pages back into the wiki: Affinity Diagram; Document Analysis; Stakeholder Onion Diagram; Stakeholder Salience Diagram; V-MOST Analysis
14 May 2019 - Figured out how to center top navigation buttons. Adding Certification page to the wiki as first exploration of some design ideas because it is text heavy and long.
11 May 2019 - Basic site concept with top navigation and side navigation for Wiki page (at least) and implemented. Wiki as new landing page, with About page also in top navigation. Placeholders added to side navigation for the 4 main wiki sections. Site design is responsive with only HTML and CSS.
9 May 2019 - New hosting provider account set up and domain hosting transfer complete.