TL;DR
My blog is now at https://blog.jameslieu.co.uk
Why?
I’ve made quite a few posts on this blog. Many of which I enjoyed writing and re-reading. The intention those posts were really for myself to read and to maybe treat as a “portfolio” to document my career and learning. I have even on occassion re-read some of the programming posts to remind myself of a topic I had forgotten which was useful.
Doing this has also increased my confidence and I’m finding that I’m more comfortatble writing for an audience now and so I wanted to move my blog to a platform like HashNode to get a little more exposure. It doesn’t change my overall intent however, I still will write these posts for myself.
A Ruby Prerequisite
Another reason why I’m moving the blog is because of the site generator I’m using for this blog - Jekyll. While I really like the concept and how easy it is to create posts with this tool, I find that getting it setup onto a new computer is not particularly streamlined.
The first glaring problem is that Jeykyll requires Ruby to run, sadly I’ve moved away from Ruby development and so I don’t code with Ruby anymore. Therefore, the only reason I would need Ruby is to run the Jekyll commands in the terminal and so I need to install it, even the Ruby version which comes with MacOS doesn’t work because of permission restrictions when installing gems. This means having to reinstall Ruby with a version manager like rbenv and installing the necessary gems.
I would usually expect to be able to run bundle exec jekyll serve but I pretty much always run into problems. On Windows I instead had to install jekyll itself onto my machine in order to get it to work. These problems takes a lot of time to deal with, although once its done, publishing new posts becomes a breeze.
Summary
So my decision to move the blog over to HashNode should hopefully make creating blogs just as easy as Jekyll allows me too (with the exception of installing software onto my computer)
My posts aren’t going to be any more elaborate than the ones on this post. And I’ll leave this original blog archived here on my GitHub pages, I’ll also need to decide what to do about my domain name jameslieu.co.uk, I could build a portfolio site or just leave it as is.
I may copy across some of my older posts over to the new one, thankfully Jekyll supported markdown and so “porting” across some of those will be easy enough.
Now onwards to my new blog: https://blog.jameslieu.co.uk