Blogging Tag

From time to time I occasionally write technical articles on a variety of subjects. Most of my full-time work is modeling, designing and documenting solutions which involves a lot of workshops and a lot of writing. It would seem strange that I would want to go home and write some more, especially considering that for the last few weeks I have had a number of ghost-writing jobs where my name is not even attached to the piece.

Well, I’ve finally finished the site update, and just in time as well as I have another article to write before the end of the year. Let’s take a look at the final site updates and see the result. List Pages While there was not much left to do, there are two content specific page types that I needed to make up to finish off the site. The first was the list pages for the blog and the articles.

I wanted to give my site a bit more of a personal feel to it with the redesign. I am also trying to stick to my thoughts around using only HTML and CSS. To serve both of these needs I have created my site as more of a desk top / drawing pad style feel. Front Page I spent a bit of time browsing Code Pen and CSS Tricks to implement the following front page.

This week I started on the cleaning up of my site. One of the main reasons I am doing this, apart from refreshing the site a bit, is to learn and optimize the HTML and CSS. My current site uses Bootstrap under the covers, which has been fine and will probably be fine if I wanted continue down this path. However I like the idea of crafting something just for my needs and learning new things.

It’s been a fairly long time since I have played around with Hugo, mainly because it just works and I don’t generally need to touch it. And, with the way static site generators work, I have no real need to update it unless I want to leverage new functionality. This site used to run on version 0.27 and Hugo is now up to 0.59, quite a big jump. There is a raft of functionality that has been added so I might as well take advantage of it.

So I have been on this journey of being more social for almost year and a half now, trying to be more forthcoming with what I have learned and achieved over my years in IT. I am also a big fan of data and statistics, they are great ways to try and measure growth for me rather than comparing against someone or something. So while I have a little bit of time, and as I am nearing 12 months since the last review, lets have another look at what my growth has been.

As you may or may not know, I run my site on an Azure Web Service using Hugo and a Visual Studio build pipeline (Full Details Here). I have been reasonably happy with this service, however late last year Microsoft made hosting static websites on Azure Storage generally available. There are a number of benefits in hosting your static website on Azure storage, the primary factor being cost. Photo by TheAndrasBarta on Pixabay

Image by Alex Iby edited by Glenn Prince on Unsplash This blog is pretty new and, as my first ever post hints at, I’m starting to be more public with the work I do. University has been the catalyst for that change however it relates to a subject I have been reading and investigating for quite a while, personal branding. Personal branding is the image and representation of yourself, particularly in the online world (Michael Page, 2017).

Roughly five months ago I began this journey of being more social, and being more forthcoming with what I have learned and achieved over my years in IT. I am also a big fan of data and statistics. So as we near the end of this year, lets have a look to see if things have improved and where to from here. Image by felipe lopez on Unsplash What I started with We are starting this review with my very first post on this site in July 2018.

The Hugo Logo copyright © Steve Francia 2013 − 2018 I like Hugo, as I have mentioned before, and I prefer to host my site within Microsoft Azure for a number of reasons, including control and the fact I play with resources within Azure, so I thought it would be good to share how I constructed my build pipeline to make working with Hugo to build and publish content in Azure a bit more automated.