It Was Fun While It Lasted

One reason for setting up my blog was to try out Azure. I've got a MSDN subscription through work so I have enough free monthly credits to cover the cost. On the whole, the experience was fun and educational. It makes the barrage of Azure feature updates a little easier to digest when you've got some skin in the game.

A point that's been driven home repeatedly of late is that I don't really need cloud scale infrastructure to handle my blog. In fact, even maintaining a PAAS solution with my meagre time budget was a challenge. Even with a month's notice I just barely managed to squeak in the re-up of my SSL cert before it expired. Updating the blogging code for Ghost took a similarly long time. None of these tasks were very challenging but I found myself questioning why I should be investing my rare idle time in useless infrastructure work.

I needed a lower maintenance solution.

Return of the Octocat

I once had a Github blog based on the Jekyll engine. It suffered from lack of content but I got a lot of enjoyment from learning a bit about Ruby and how Liquid templates work. Now that I'm back on the Github platform things are a bit lower key. I've borrowed the site design from the excellent Phil Haack with a few tweaks of my own.

With a template in place I can comfortably focus on writing. Not that I have a lot of time for that between work and family. Over the years, I've gotten sufficiently comfortable with markdown that I can draft this in Nodepad++ and be reasonably confident that I got it all correct. Scratch that, I screwed up the link syntax. Heh. Ok, moving to StackEdit. Its a better editor than Ghost anyway.