It's been a while - sorry, had a lot on - but I'm back with a funky new style, a much better software platform and - hopefully - a bit more content than I used to write!

New platform!

In the past, I just wanted a really simple blog platform, one where I could write posts in markdown, commit them to GitHub and have done with it. This worked fine for the most part but it had a few downsides:

• Editing / Writing on mobile was actually a bit of a pain
• I couldn’t easily add meta-data such as tagging or related articles to posts
• It was a bit rubbish for SEO
• There was no DB at all so comments relied on Disqus which isn't a great solution.

I intended to create a new blog using a proper CMS platform but - as it is prone to do - life got in the way (I’m sure I’ll write a post detailing exactly how at some point but for now I’ll summarised it as - stuff happened). Last year, I took a job where the backbone of the project needed to be all written using a CMS system called Sanity, it was a fantastic platform that had a free, cloud editor which was incredibly customisable via a code-based schema.

This year, I finally found the time and - with a little bit of speeding up from AI I set up this new blog!

Migration woes

Then came the arduous task of migrating approximately 70 articles to the new platform, there wasn’t an easy migration tool to do this (that worked reliably), so I decided to manually shift each article by hand, copy and pasting the text and re-uploading (and sometimes replacing) all of the images.

This turned out to be a really good idea as it allowed me to give a bit of a facelift to some of the really old posts, so I’m actually glad I did it this way. It was a very boring few days but it’s all done now!

Fresh content

Even though I haven’t updated my blog in a while, I’ve still written a few articles and I’ve got several more in my head that I will be writing soon, I’m particularly interested in the rise of AI-assisted coding, so you can expect to see a few articles about that soon!

Most importantly for me, I plan to resume my yearly goal updates. I am aware by my analytics that these are not popular posts to my audience but they help me track my life and how I am progressing through it, I’ll just have to make sure there are enough posts per year that they don’t look like they are the only article I write (which has been the case for a very long time now!)

Roadmap

Whilst I’ve implemented most of the features I want in this blog that I’ve not had before (Tagging, author bio page, pagination and search), there are still a few more things I’d like to add, so in the coming days and weeks, you can expect the following to be added:

• Social sharing
• A comment system
• Cross posting with Medium

Stay tuned!

Stay tuned, there’s more to come!