THWACK
It’s alive!
In the immortal words of Monty Python, “I’m not dead yet!”
After a very long absence from posting things, I’ve pulled the body out of the freezer, moved it to a new location and fired up the old jumper cables to bring it back to life.
There were a few factors that helped corpsify the old site:
- No readers
- Lull in topics/ideas
- Platform related items
No readers
This was a bit of a chicken and the egg issue; no content for the handful of readers I had, and a lack of readers hurting my motivation to make more content.
There are two problems there though:
- It’s “build it and they will come” not “draw them in and promise content in the future”.
- Selfish as it may sound, this should be a project for me to learn and record my discoveries. Anything else is incidental.
Lull in topics/ideas
A lot has changed since the last posts; some of it in my $DayJob, and even more in the industry and the spaces I deal with. There are plenty of things to talk about, and get into. Some of this will be helped by the platform change as well though.
Platform related items
Previously I had been using Blogger, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with Blogger; it’s well liked by many.
It was however the wrong tool for me. I’m not a web person; I don’t “speak” HTML, CSS, etc., and don’t really want/need to. While you don’t need to do any of that for Blogger, it helps you make use of more of it’s capabilities. I was basically writing my posts in Word and uploading them, which isn’t a very effective or efficient use of the platform.
However over the last year or so, I like many Windows folks (especially those working with PowerShell) have been working more and more with things like Markdown and Git.
Markdown + Git + simple site/blog = Jekyll on GitHubPages and that’s the route I shifted to.
It took a bit of finagling; partially getting my Jekyll environment setup in my WSL Ubuntu install, and partially around getting my old posts converted from HTML to Markdown. But, it’s done now and working, although still continuing to tweak and fine-tune.
Normally you’d expect to see a How I setup my Jekyll environment post, but personally I’d much rather improve the official documentation that new users will start with rather than make them dig through the various “how I got mine to work in spite of/around the documentation”.
To that end I’ve already made one pull request for the Jekyll on Windows documentation and will have another one soon to clear up the other reproducible issue I ran into.
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