I've been thinking long and hard lately about what I want to do with the blog; how I want to interact with it, how I want it to appear not only to myself as a chronicle of a lifetime spent but also as a tool for others to learn and grow.
Accordingly I set about looking at the different options there are for a blogging platform.
I'm very confident in the teachings of Scott Hanselman, as such I wanted to make my blog as user friendly as possible and also not a complex unruly bastard for me to maintain. I'm a 1x Dev not 10x (just yet anyway) As such, right now I don't need to care about the page impressions, hits, conversions and other big words a blog that brings in the [insert unit of measure] of cash concerns itself with.
Presently the current version of the blog is hosted on Github Pages:
Yes I use light mode, I actually exclusively use dark mode on nearly everything but, as time is going on I am slowly going back to light mode things, no idea why but maybe it's a 'change in the wind, says I' to quote Master Gibbs from Pirates of the Carribean.
GitHub Pages is a free service and I recommend it for people wanting to start learning how to do things like version control, how to interact with Github itself and 'DevOps' type things with Github like the deployments for your blog etc.
Honestly it's a system that works quite well and as such I'm probably going to stick with it. I have tried things like Wordpress and a self hosted solution using Azure and the blogging engine DasBlog, But when you're trying to do things as cheaply as possible a free simple static website hosted on a free web service... you can't really beat that.
While the current version of the blog is great and all there is a lot of stuff that it does and doesn't do, it has a lot of features that I'm not quite using, I'm not fully happy with the layout of the blog either I want something just stupidly simple
Well you know what stupidly simple in this day and age? HTML.
HTML (Hyper Text Markup language) is so stupidly basic that even I can get it right and better still I'm not learning how to use a new function or new service. I am just coding pure html, simple
One of the better parts about HTML is that there is so much knowledge and answers out there for any question that you might have like; 'I want to put a graph in my HTML page' or 'I want to do a table on this page' everything can be done with HTML and because of that it's incredibly responsive, viewable just about everywhere and incredibly quick to load... blog posts are practically no size at all:
See, tiny files!
The only real thing I see myself having a problem with is getting used to squeezing images into the blog. I think I have about 600 pixels 800 pixels wide to play with so getting images to fit in that could be a nightmare and I might have to look at something where 'on click' it opens the image in a new tab or something like that so you get the full size of the image, In fact, that's a genius idea I'm going to implement that now cause it's just an extra little thing you have to add to the img tag in html
I haven't yet decided what I'm going to do with my old content. I know a lot of it is geared towards how I used to think about things and how I used to approach things and while that content is important, some of it is shared elsewhere such as the FUD Fighter articles, they're on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is supposed to be a 'professional network' but since they won't do anything for harassment cases then I may as well just leave them there... could it be a blemish on my profile and how people see me as professional? Maybe, however my work ethic and the other content that I put out is incredibly strong also.
I'm going to see how this works out for a bit as a 'clean slate' maybe I'll move stuff over, maybe I'll just keep it in an archive locally on my computer or something.
I'm hoping that this new attitude and new mindset that I've got towards blogging and how I want to do things and how I want to be essentially 'remembered'... I hope it works out.