Visual Studio for Mac simctl error

My investigations into Blazor have caused me to install a few preview apps, Visual Studio for Mac 2022 being one of them, and as with many preview apps it has problems.

Most recently I needed to make some changes to the Smite Scoreboard app so duly flashed up the Mac and, even though I had installed it for Blazor investigations, Visual Studio for Mac 2022 Preview. After a few minutes reviewing the code a dialog was displayed advising that an update was available so I clicked to install it …. and that’s when the fun started.

Flicking the switch on Github Pages

Well, after a couple of months of investigations, configuration and migration the move from Wordpress to Github pages is all but done - just a few DNS configurations and you’ll be reading this post.

My previous half a dozen posts describe the journey from Wordpress to Github Pages, my motivation for the move, the mechanics and the hurdles I faced.

In general the process of hand migrating each and every post, reviewing the progress in technology since 2009, fixing typos & broken links was quite enlightening. Things have moved on a lot in that time and I have tried to keep up as best I can - knowing that I will never know it all.

With this mini-project all but complete I can now start to think about what’s next on my TODO list - and it looks like it’s moving my other, personal, blog from Wordpress before it’s subscription expires. It’s much smaller than this blog and knowing what I know now it would be quite simple to migrate it to Github Pages - but I’m not going to..!

Comment Import

Following on from my previous update regarding the migration to Github Pages I decided to look at the importing of previous comments and have completed that process.

I had previously thought about just discarding the comments but after reading through them it was clear that there was an amount of good content in there and seeing as people had taken the time to leave them I thought it was a bit harsh to just thrown them away.

That being said, I have made the decision not to look at implementing a comment system into the new blog - if someone wants to contact me there’s always Twitter and Mastodon.

Being a relative newbie to the whole Jekyll platform and the Liquid language I needed to do some research but quickly fell onto a post by Phil Haack where he discusses this very topic.

Static Website Update

Well today is a milestone in the migration of this blog from Wordpress to Github Pages - I’ve (hopefully) transferred all posts as well as created the additional pages such as About and those for the mobile apps.

The process has been pretty eye opening, reading the 160+ posts dating back to 2009, copy/pasting the content from my browser into Visual Studio code, saving the images and downloads and reformatting everything into markdown.

I’ve split the process across my Windows 10, Mac and Linux devices with very little friction. Creating snippets in Visual Studio code to allow me to quick add markup elements for images, downloads and the Jekyll front matter section at the head of every post has sped up the process no end.

Tag Generation with Jekyll

Moving from a CMS like Wordpress to a static website/blog has a lot of advantages but also a number of drawbacks - one of them being the loss of a Search function.

But is this really a deal breaker? I mean, how many times do you think someone will actually use the search box on your blog? Think about it, they’ve probably reached your blog via a search anyway so they are on the post they want to be on already. Once they’ve read it, how many will actually stick around to see what else you’ve written … I mean, really.

Chances are they will click Back on their browser, return to Google/Bing/Whatever and continue looking for whatever they were looking for when they clicked on the link to your post.

So, I’m not going to lose any sleep over the absence of a Search facility on my blog, but that doesn’t mean that I need to throw all sence of navigation out of the window.