Welcome …

… to v2 of my personal site.

Version 1 was created using mkdocs and deployed on GitHub pages. Mkdocs is extremely simple to use and a powerful tool, but perhaps not ideal for a more “modern” looking site. While I could have run a blog using mkdocs, it wasn’t entirely practical, and it was for that reason I then set up a seperate tech blog site.

stddev.tech

This was actually pretty short lived, mainly because I used the hosted version of Ghost, which was quite expensive for somebody just running a small blog with only a handful of visitors, so when it came time to renew I found it hard to justify.

I exported all the posts to an XML file and cancelled the subscription, putting a redirect on to michjnich.com and leaving a note there to say I’d get back to blogging later, once I sorted out a new solution.

It’s always later, isn’t it?

Anyway … fast forward a little. Life got in the way of things - a new job, a couple of health crises in the family, and not a lot of energy over for side projects meant that the message about importing the old blogposts from the stddev.tech blog remained, while the posts themselves sat in the same XML file in my download folder.

Finally …

… I’ve got around to doing something about it. This new site looks (I hope!) a little more professional, and is generated using Hugo - a static site generator. It’s still deployed on GitHub pages, so free hosting from a repo there. The theme in use (at least currently - I may change it later) is toha.

So what are my goals here?

Well, a couple of things really.

  1. To put my profile out there in a more professional looking way than previously.
  2. To start blogging again, and bring in the old posts from the now defunct stddev.tech site.

I think (1) has been achieved upon release, though I’m sure there are a few changes I can make. For (2), I’ve made a start by posting a couple of articles I wrote on LinkedIn over the last couple of years, which I think are still relevant. The main reason they were writen on LinkedIn and not my blog in the first place was really just to get the author badge. That achievement having been unlocked, I doubt I will write any more articles there - why create unpaid content for somebody else’s site when I can put it on my own?

I’ll get to the old articles soon, I promise - those that are still useful at least.