Blog

Posts written in April 2020.

  • Published on
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    3 min read

    Technical Blogging: Where Should I Be Writing?

    I’ve had this blog since 2007 when I had a bright idea to make a small mark on the internet. Back then, there weren’t many platforms to easily contribute ones technical thoughts freely in writing as there are now. All you really had were forums and a handful of other sites in the likes of 4GuysFromRolla.com, C# Corner and LearnASP.com (to name a few that come to mind). Now I could be wrong about the accuracy of this opening statement as 2007 was a long time ago - back in much simpler times when I was a Junior Web Developer.

    We have now come to a point where we’re spoilt for choice. There are multiple mediums where you have the freedom to publish your own technical writing in a more public and accessible way, the main ones being:

    • Medium
    • Dev.to
    • Hashnode.com
    • LinkedIn Articles

    At present, I post some of my writing to Medium whether that is a clone of my own blog content or new material specifically for the platform. However, I’m now rethinking where I should be publishing my content as I am now seeing more of my fellow developers on Twitter posting content to dev.to, when they previously used Medium.

    I really like dev.to found its approach to content curation to the developer community refreshing, which makes for very addictive reading and you can really see the passion in the writers. Should I start cross-posting there as well for more exposure? How does this affect things from an SEO standpoint where I have the same post on my blog as well as Medium and dev.to? All I know is anything I cross-post from my blog to Medium gets ranked higher in Google search results, which is to be expected.

    If I’m being honest to myself, I like posting content where I’m another small cog part of a wider community as there is a higher chance in like-minded individuals gaining access to your content and in the process get involved by commenting and imparting their knowledge on your written piece. You can’t help but feel rewarded when your article gets a like, clap or comment, which in return makes you want to do the same for other contributers. This doesn’t really happen on a personal website.

    When you are posting on another platform you don’t have to worry about technical issues or hosting. The only thing you need to do is write! But you have to remember that you’re writing in a platform that is not your own and any future changes will be out of your control.

    As great as these other writing platforms are, you are restricted in really seeing the developers personality, which is something that speaks volumes when viewing their personal website. They present their content in their own unique way and most importantly write about things freely that, otherwise, may not be within the parameters of a third-party platform.

    Final Thoughts

    As I’ve noted a shift in the number of technical posts being published to dev.to, I will more than likely do the same and cross-post any relevant content from my personal site. You can’t help but feel it’s the best place to get exposure to programming related content. Having said this, I still feel there’s is space for me to also cross-post to Medium. But what I won’t do is cross-post the same content to both. This feels counter-intuitive. Use the most appropriate platform that has the highest chance of targeting the readers based on the subject matter in hand.

    I don’t think I could ever stop writing within my own site as I like the freedom of expression - no strings attached. I can write about whatever I want and if there happens to be a post I’d like to also publish to the likes of either Medium or dev.to, I got the flexibility to do that as well.

  • Published on
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    3 min read

    Journey To GatsbyJS: We Are Live

    If you’re seeing this post, then this means I have fully made the transition to a static-generated website architecture using GatsbyJS. I started this process late December last year but then started taking it seriously into the new year. It’s been a learning process getting to grips with a new framework as well as a big jump for me and my site.

    Why has it been a big jump?

    Everything is static. I have downsized my website footprint exponentially. All 250+ blog posts have been migrated into markdown files, so from now on, I will be writing in markdown and (with the help of Netlify) pushing new content by a simple git commit. Until now, I have always had a website that used server-side frameworks that stored all my posts in a database. It’s quite scary moving to a framework that feels quite unnatural to how I would normally build sites and the word “static” when used in relation to a website reminds me of a bygone era.

    Process of Moving To Netlify

    I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the transition to Netlify was. There is a vast amount of resources available that makes for good reading before making the switch to live. After linking my website Bitbucket repository to a site, the only things left to do to make it live were the following:

    • Upload a _redirects file, listing out any redirects you require Netlify to handle. For GatsbyJS sites, this will need to be added to the /static directory.
    • Setup Environment variables to allow the application to easily switch between development and production states. For example, my robots.txt is set to be indexable when only in production mode.
    • Add CNAME records to your existing domain that point to your Netlify domain. For example, surindersite.netlify.com.
    • Issue a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, which is easily done within the account Domain settings.

    Post live, the only thing that stumped me was the Netlify domain didn’t automatically redirect to my custom domain. This is something I thought Netlify would automatically handle once the domain records were updated. To get around this, an explicit domain 301 redirect needs to be added to your _redirects file.

    # Domain Redirect
    https://surinderbhomra.netlify.com/*     https://www.surinderbhomra.com/:splat    301!
    

    New Publishing Process

    Before making the switchover, I had to carry out some practice runs on how I would be updating my website just to be sure I could live with the new way of adding content. The process is now the following:

    1. Use “content/posts” branch to add a new blog post.
    2. Create a new .md file that consists of the date and slug. In my case, all my markdown files are named "2010-04-02---My-New-Post.md".
    3. Ensure all categories and tags in the markdown frontmatter is named correctly. This is an important step to ensure no unnecessary new categories or tags are created.
    4. Add any images used in the post to the site. The images should reference Imagekit.io.
    5. Check over the post locally.
    6. Push to master branch and let Netlify carry out the rest.

    Out of all the steps, I have only found steps 3 and 4 to require a little effort when compared to using a CMS platform, as previously, I could select from a predefined list of categories and upload images directly. Not a deal-breaker.

    Next Steps

    I had a tight deadline to ensure I made the move to Netlify before my current hosting renews for another year and still have quite a bit of improvement to make. Have you seen my Google Lighthouse score!?! It’s shockingly bad due to using the same HTML markup and CSS from my old site. I focused my efforts cramming in all the functionality to mimic how my site used to work and efficiencies in keeping build times to Netlify low.

    First thing on the list - rebuild website templates from the ground up.