Setting up my blog

Wed, 07 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This is a brief summary of the steps I had to take when setting up my blog. There probably isn’t too much revolutionary here but perhaps can help some people avoid some of the pitfalls or confusions that I encountered.

#Choices

I wanted things to be quick, easy and as paint free as possible and after looking at things settled on a standard ish jekyll setup for github pages. The free hosting on github obviously a big plus as you are simply pushing up static files onto their infrastucture and the process is dead simple.

Writing posts in markdown also made a lot of sense to from a usability perspective. I’m comfortable working with it and it afforda lots

#Jekyll

I'm a writer now

Sat, 01 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Starting a blog is something that has been on my todo list for a long time.

I first had this idea while still at university. I was going to make a small portfolio site as a pet project and learn a little along the way. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, it never came to be

It’s not that I didn’t want to. I really did.

I even went so far as to create a prototype and throw it up on some shady free web host. However, it quickly became apparent that things were going to look a little sparse as I didn’t exactly have a huge portfolio back then! After mulling it over for a while I reasoned that a blog would a relatively easy way to flesh this out.

At the time I had just finished a year long internship at Microsoft in Dublin so could probably pull together some decent material. With hindsight I really wish I had followed up on this but alas. The posts weren’t written, the hosting expired and the files lay forgotten on a backup hard drive.

The next time I seriously considered it was was just after I was hired by EventMAP as one of their first engineers. This was a hugely exciting time for me but with the challenges of the new job and learning how to manage the pretty heavy workload, the blog was sidelined once again.

Fast forward to today.

In January I passed the first year viva on my Phd program and am still heading up the web development at EventMAP. I am probably busier than ever, indeed I created the first files for this site back in February! So it’s reasonable to as - why start a blog now then?!

Well, over the past number of years I have made it a habit to specifically dedicate time to reading up on tech and tech related things. Usually this takes the form of reddit, hacker news or my feedly list. The vast majority of the content is made up of blog posts or recommendations I have found through posts. As time goes on I find myself turning to my feed more and more as I curate it to focus on my favourite bloggers and content most applicable to me. This often has left me feeling somewhat guilty.

All take and no give

Then I recently read an old post from 2010 by Scott Hanselman - Do they deserve the gift of your keystrokes?

While the premise of “you are going to die soon” is a touch morbid, I really do find it profoundly challenging at the same time.

So whats next?

With all this in mind I hope to use this as a way to challenge myself with the following goals:

Motivation to develop up and share some unfinished side projects
Learn some new skills
Contribute back to the online communities I have learnt so much from

Lets see how it goes.

jamesdonanaldson.io

Setting up my blog

I'm a writer now