Oh dear, the last blogpost on my blog was from 2016! It would be easy to say that I was just missing the time to blog. I feel this is only partially true.
In the very same period I generated lot of talks/presentations instead of blogposts.
Now I feel the need to write again and not wait for a presentation or just tweet things. I could do it on one of the platforms such as Medium or LinkedIn, but call me old school and not wanting to be locked up in somebody elses platform.
It’s not perfect , but it’s working. Here’s my TL;DR of the migration of reviving my old blog in a nutshell.
If for some reason there is an issue , drop a message below in the comments.
Engine
- Moved once again engine: Wordpress (2006) -> Webby (2009) -> DIY Nwebby (2014) -> Hugo (2022)
- Biggest annoyance with Hugo was disabling the default RSS feed of finding all content .
- Content in Markdown with metadata section at the top made it easy to port, will keep it like that.
Styling
- No more need for custom rendering of codeblock - this is handled by the markdown processor (github code blocks)
- Nice code highlighting (language syntax) - using https://highlightjs.org/
- Move to Github style CSS theming https://github.com/sindresorhus/github-markdown-css/
- Introduced Darkmode support - this played a little with Disquss but I was able to handle with some JS
- Site is now responsive due to the Github CSS.
External Services
- Removed Flickr - not much to see there any way.
- Removed feedburner as an RSS feed proxy - Hugo is directly generating it.
- Enabled RSS feeds again , seems there is a new appetite for it.
- Youtube / Github profile added at the top.
- Google Analytics and Disquss survived with an easy upgrade.
Content
- Added all presentations , books , articles I ever did in one section.
- Removed my slideshare content because I got troubles due to copyright issues on images , no risk again.
Deployment
- CI/CD workflow is still working well to publish the site ; seems pretty standard now.
- Moved to HTTPS ( using Route53 using ACM using Cloudfront static rendering). Was surprised the default Cloudfront to S3 integration could not handle serving subdirs with index.html in there. For that I had to resort back to public static webhosting on s3 bucket.
- Will move to Netlify or AWS Amplify for easier deployment (WIP) : Setting up a website using Cloudfront , S3 buckets is getting too complex to my taste.
Now on to new content ! Don’t forget to subscribe through RSS now :)