One of the unintended effects of automating the posting of blog post links to Mastodon has led to the fix of a long standing issue I had with my RSS feed. As seems to be a recurring theme with running this blog, the fix was very simple, taught me more about the way Hugo works, and has delivered other benefits too.
An thought struck me when browsing Mastodon yesterday - how can I automate the posting of a link to my new blog posts on my Mastodon account? While this took me on something of a journey to find what options exist, the actual solution I landed upon is very straightforward.
I discovered that the Hello Friend theme I am currently using will no longer be maintained. The repository was archived on 10 June 2023. This leaves me with a decision to make.
With the demise of 3rd party Twitter clients such as Tweetbot (and with it my use of Twitter itself), I’ve started using Mastodon as an alternative. One of the capabilities it offers is verification of links added to your profile. There are a couple of ways to do this, and I’ve settled on what I think is a nice clean method.
I haven’t really told anyone about this blog as it’s more of a project to give me somewhere to do something technical rather than a place I want to drive traffic to. Even so, as I write more content, it would be nice to see more traffic arrive organically at the site. To track how this grows over time, I’ve enabled GoatCounter on the site…
While in the process of writing my (currently unpublished) About page, one of the things I wanted to add were icons for the links to my various social media profiles. I could add these as images, but I figured it might be cool to add Font Awesome to the blog. Turns out it’s actually very simple to do…
One of the reasons I feel have failed to blog at all over the past 4 years is that the barrier to entry was too high. Rather than focusing on writing content, I would spend lots of time trying to remember how to use the tools, get frustrated, and give up. Some of this friction can be removed with a handy Hugo feature called Archetypes.
I am much more enthusiastic about this site since the theme change! I would say it satisfies about 95% of what I would have created myself had I the skills to do so!
There are a few things I would like to change to take care of that final 5%. Here’s how I tackled a couple of them.
It’s been a long time since I updated this site! Almost exactly 4 years in fact. I wasn’t totally happy with how the site looked which lead to a bizarre case of not really wanting to update it at all. I’ve finally had a little downtime to perform some updates and I’m much happier! Here’s what I changed…
Consul is widely known as a service discovery tool but has many more features that make it a “Swiss Army Knife” when it comes to connecting and configuring services across different runtime platforms, and both public and private clouds. I recorded a webinar that explored some of the lesser known features including blocking queries, watches, locks and remote execution.