Toastmasters Zoom

Toastmasters Zoom

I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago explaining how I had updated the way my website got published, using a CI Pipeline. I hilariously (at the time) announced that 2020 was the Year of CI, not VDI. Since that time, things have changed. A lot. I’ve spent the best part of four weeks at home along with most of the rest of the world as we all take shelter from the COVID-19 epidemic sweeping the globe.
2020 - The Year of CI (not VDI)

2020 - The Year of CI (not VDI)

When I last had a serious update of this site it was 2017 and I had decided to go all trendy, with my static site generator and my S3 hosted website. But I didn’t really finish the job, so this time, whilst revisiting my blog as part of a Level 4 Toastmasters project to write eight blog posts in a month, it was time to close the Circle(CI). Haha! Yes, these February 2020 blog posts are more intertwined than one might first think.
2020 Return

2020 Return

Well, I’m back. Just when you thought it was safe… Has it really been that long? Wow! Leave a few draft blog posts hanging around to be published ‘as soon as I tidy this up’ and sometimes you just never get back to finishing them off. It’s easily done. A lot has happened since the previous post, which advertised the 2017 UK VMUG UserCon. A lot of it has been VMUG related too, one way or another.
AWS Domain Management

AWS Domain Management

Another bunch of steps have been taken, I got asked to blog about this for posterity, so here it is. Transferring a Domain to AWS It was ridiculously easy to carry out this step. Just follow the steps in the Domain Transfer to Route 53 guide from AWS. This took me all of 5 minutes to complete. Mail Setting up email is next. AWS offer a number of options, but SES (Simple Email Service) is the cheapest.
Progress Report Week 1

Progress Report Week 1

It’s been about a week since I decided to shift my site from Blogger to using static pages hosted on AWS with Hugo as the means to develop it. In that time, I’ve: started writing pages using markdown, I’d never used it before finally got to grips with Git to track all my changes locally (I also have the option to put my code in GitHub / AWS) converted all my web pages to markdown, from blogger, via wordpress changed image locations added a new London VMUG based blogroll incorporated the bits for disqus and google analytics The whole point of this exercise was to put myself on the bottom of a different learning curve and that has definitely worked.
Discuss Disqus

Discuss Disqus

For website comment integration, Hugo supports Disqus out of the box. For this to work, you will need to be set up as a Disqus user and then create a Disqus site. When this is done, you simply populate the disqusShortname entry in your config file. For me, the line disqusShortname = "virtualmachinery" exists in my config.toml file. Disqus guides you through all of the basic setup, it’s very user friendly and I had no issues with that whatsoever.
Shipping a blog from Blogger to Hugo

Shipping a blog from Blogger to Hugo

This move was actually the culmination of a number of factors. The Blogger platform itself is fine, albeit proprietary and somewhat limited because of that, but you still need a bunch of other things to make that work. As with anything on the internet and I’ve sometimes had issues with the other aspects there. More than that though, this was simply a means to get myself into a newer format and learn something new along the way.