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.

Making Progress with Static Blog

Moving from Wordpress to a Github Pages static blog has been going pretty well with over 30 posts migrated across. This may not sounds like a lot but I’ve been making my way up the learning curve, configuring and experimenting with Jekyll (the static site generator) and getting my Visual Studio Code workspace working well.

I now have the output almost as I want it, I still want/need pagination and a tag cloud, but these things will come in time.

So long Wordpress, Hello Github Pages

Over the years I have used many different platforms to serve up this blog including, Wordpress, Joomla!, Drupal and SquareSpace. At the time of writing this post I’m hosting it on Wordpress.com (using Wordpress obviously) but this post will never appear there. Why?

Well, the blog started life as an aide memoire for myself so that I could save myself the time trawling the Internet when I’d managed to resolve some issue or other. If it helped others along the way then all well and good.

When I branched out as an Independant Contractor I extended it to become my company website giving me a web presence allowing clients to see what I’ve been working on.

After nine years of contracting and as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic essentially closing down the market here in the UK I decided to return to ‘normal’ employment so the site reverted back to the blog is started out as.

Now, when I was contracting it was my company that was paying wordpress.com £240/yr for the Business Plan, which I needed due to a handful of plugins I was using. However, after shutting my company down and swapping payment to my personal card I forgot all about this and ended up paying it myself when it renewed after I’d reverted it to being a simple blog. Not the end of the world but basically money I didn’t really need to spend.

With that in mind I decided to contact Wordpress.com about downgrading the site to the Personal plan so that I could save a bit of cash (I have another personal blog on that plan costing me just £37/yr) - and that’s where the ‘fun’ started.

Apple Certs and Profiles – without a Mac

While I have used Windows 10 for the screenshots etc I am reliably informed that the process also works for Windows 11

I think we will all agree that the annual chore of regenerating signing certificates and provisioning profiles for our iOS project is just that – a chore. Not only do we have to remember the dance that we performed the year before but also need to dust off the Mac Mini and hope it boots.

But why a Mac Mini? Why are we tied to using Apple hardware to generate our certificate signing request and to export the resulting certificate in the correct format?

Well, as it turns out ….. we don’t, we can in fact use Windows 10 using built in tooling.

Running Linux on a Mac! Why?

I never like to throw anything away and when it comes to technology, you never know when you may need it.

So when my 2013 iMac stopped receiving OS updates from Apple I wondered what I could do with it.

Afterall, if it won’t run the latest OS then it won’t run the latest version of XCode and if it can’t run the latest version of XCode then I can’t use it to develop apps for iOS. More accurately, I can develop the apps but because I can’t compile against the latest SDK ultimately the App Store will reject them.

As my MacBook Pro had taken over the role of Xamarin development system the iMac had sat under my desk, unused for months.

So while Apple’s policy of, essentially, obsoleting my hardware is frustrating that doesn’t mean I have to throw the whole thing out – that’s not in my nature. So what could I do with it?