This Blog

Resurrecting this blog after… well, a while.

A quick history lesson

A WordPress blog on this sub-domain started back in October 2007 for very different reasons. It was trawled by The Wayback Machine showing the first post in December 2007.

I might add those articles back in later, but for now I wanted to talk tech.

I loved that WordPress blog. Even back then, WordPress was seriously impressive. I used it to build several websites for clients. Most of them were blown away by the fact that they could modify the content themselves. Remember: this was 2006–2008, and a customer managing their own content was very new.

Before discovering WordPress, I actually wrote my own CMS. Didn’t everyone back in those days? Access control was via an htaccess file. No one could add images because I couldn’t work out how to write the code that allowed a customer to upload files.

Why the reboot?

A couple of reasons. I miss writing blogs and writing code. I explained in my other post that I don’t write much code at the moment and want to keep my hand in, especially with AI tooling for developers moving so quickly.

So I have four goals for this blog:

1. Post fortnightly on tech-adjacent topics
2. Work out what AI tools I like to use in VS Code for writing code and reviewing articles
3. Update my CSS knowledge
4. Learn Hugo

Why Hugo?

Lots of reasons.

1. Something to write articles, but still have a developer feel: pipelines, Git repos, pull requests, etc. It helps get the developer muscle memory back.
2. Free hosting. There are a lot of options if all you have is static HTML.
3. Something that was NOT Microsoft/.NET/Azure based, so it didn’t feel like work.

Hopefully you enjoy reading. I’ve certainly enjoyed the articles I’ve written so far.