I loved the ease of publishing new software development content to this journal using write.as. But I didn't really like how it all turned out. Specifically, I thought it was jarring to be reading a post on SQL Server, then hit the homepage to find posts on video games and God. It felt awkward to me.

So, I decided to once again start publishing software development posts to a dedicated software development blog. This time around, instead of going back to a static site generator, I spun up a new dev blog on write.as. I'm hoping that the ease of publishing new content outweighs the drawbacks of having yet another website to maintain. We'll see how it goes.

The new dev blog is still very much under construction. But I wanted to get this notice out there in case some people are wondering where the other software development posts have gone.

Anyway, that was all I wanted to say regarding the new dev blog. Now for a slight update on how I've been doing after I've traded blogging for family time.

I'm honestly enjoying not needing to post so often to this journal. I have a lot more free time at night and I've been using it to play Minecraft Dungeons with my son. It's a great video game for father and son bonding time. We recently just defeated the Arch-Illager and the Heart of Ender. And we've just started on the Jungle Awakens DLC. I might write some Game Logs post for it, if I have some spare time. We'll see.

Anyway, that's all for now. I hope you all have a good weekend. Thanks for reading.

Tags: #SiteUpdates #Blogging #SoftwareDevelopment

Previously, I used an embedded Glitch app to dynamically create the contents for my Archive page. It worked well, but it was also slow. It was slow because every time you visit the page, the Glitch app had to wake up, then pull all my write.as posts and finally display them in a list. The slowness was a stark contrast to other pages on this site — most of which load very quickly. I also didn't like the idea of depending on a third-party service to serve up the contents of my Archive page.

So, I've been wanting to switch to a static Archive page for awhile now. My problem was that I already had over 350 posts on this site. To get me started, I needed a way to quickly generate a list of all posts on this site. For this, I created a .NET Core console app. This app would get all my posts using the write.as API. Then the app would spit out the list of all posts in HTML format. My first pass actually had it spitting out text in Markdown. But I quickly ran into issues with Markdown and <div> elements not playing well together. So, HTML it was. Anyway, once I had the output on a text file, all I had to do was copy over the HTML and paste it into my Archive page.

So, now my Archive page no longer relies on an embedded Glitch app. It is now a static page. The plan is to manually update the contents of that page every weekend. Since I don't post multiple times a day, I figure manually updating the page once a week would be manageable. I already do the same thing for my Series and Tags page anyway.

This post is Day 35 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Visit https://100daystooffload.com to get more info, or to get involved.

Tags: #SiteUpdates #SoftwareDevelopment #100DaysToOffload

Link: Write Tests Before Bug Fixes

Tags: #SoftwareDevelopment