Articles 1 to 10

As I mentioned in different articles and in the About page, this website is being built using a static site generator, namely nanoc. Every time I push changes to the code repo – be it configuration changes, new or updated articles, etc –, a new build is triggered on Netlify and the new version of the site is deployed. This is all well and good, except that on some occasions, it would be nice to be able to schedule new articles to come up on the site on a specific day, without having to manually push the content only then. In the last few days, I spent some time to see how this could be done and this post will look into the solution that I put in place using Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

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While I have always been interested in office material – I remember going through catalogues of pens and paper that my parents brought back home when I was a child / teenager – my interest in organization and “being ready quickly” just went off the charts in the last few years. As usual, turning to the Internet to look into my disease, I learned that there was a name for what I was interested in: Everyday Carry, or EDC in short.

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I am getting more and more interested in static websites as I am following the developments in the JAMSTACK space. I have covered in previous articles some of the benefits of having a static site, such as better performance, easier scaling, cheap hosting to name a few. In this article, I wanted to share a few thoughts based on my latest experimentation and implementation.

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I took some time recently to help out and redesign a website using Middleman. Considering that this was a simple website with only a few pages, it was a good opportunity to use a tool that I never used before. Once the layout was defined and the content was imported, it was time to create a favicon. I do not have much experience with that so I was browsing / googling around to see how to proceed when I stumbled upon favicon.io.

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Comments on this website are managed by Disqus. I installed and configured this a long time ago when initially starting the transition to having a static website but still wanting to offer readers the possibility to comments on the articles I published.

While this solution might be convenient for me as a site owner (one click integration with a free tier available), it does come with a number of drawbacks, whether around privacy concerns or page load times. I have the ambition of removing it altogether in the (hopefully near) future but before I do so, I need to find a way to import the existing comments to whatever new system I put in place. Some articles include interesting and valuable input or links in the comments, so this would be a shame to lose them altogether.

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As I wrote a few months back already, I haven’t been very active around here for a while. With the exception of the article earlier this year, it has been a pause of around 3 years in my writing and publishing. Obviously a lot happened during the last 3 years – both on the personal and professional fronts –, and this is probably the reason why my priorities got shifted a bit but I would like to give this blog a new start and see if I can publish at least once a month in the coming year. Ambitious enough for someone who hasn’t written for a while BUT not too ambitious so that it becomes overwhelming.

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It has been a long time since I posted something and it was time for some clean-up, so bye-bye Google Analytics. It was long pending on my to-do list and really quick to remove but life happened in between and it therefore took a long time to get done.

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Firefox is my browser of choice currently, mostly due to its philosophy centered around a web accessible to all. I therefore use it as the default browser on all computer, and that includes my working computer. However, at work, I started encountering a rather peculiar issue where Chrome and Edge could access the web without any issue but Firefox would keep on throwing me warning on almost all pages being visited to tell me “ Your connection is not secure”. Solving the issue proved to be quite simple but comes with a risk.

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As I mentioned in a previous article, this website is purely static and has been so for a while now. However, the site structure and components have not been revisited for a number of years and while it was performing quite well (with a page size well under the current web page average size), a number of things were a bit overkill and unnecessary. As an example, the site was relying on a full fledge front-end component library containing both Javascript and CSS files which were barely used. It was time to perform some clean up activities to identify what was actually used or not to try and see how this could improve the overall website performance.

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While this is something that I keep on repeating privately on a regular basis, I have never published anything on this subject here. Time to fix this and dive into some of the reasons why you should restrain yourself from posting anything about your children on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, etc.). I am probably naively hoping that one more post on the subject will make a difference and that some people will end up on this page and radically modify their behavior.

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