Blog Writing for Developers
A presentation about effective blog writing for developers, covering why to blog, what to write about, and how to structure your content.
How to create Carousel posts in LinkedIn…without the bullshit
| tl;dr: Upload a PDF document in which each slide of the carousel is one page. |
I wanted to post a Carousel post in LinkedIn, but had to wade through a million pages of crap in Google from companies trying to sell shit. Here’s how to do it simply.
Write more blog articles, not fewer (Don’t leave the scraps on the cutting floor)
Some would say that the perfect blog article takes the reader on a journey on in which the development process looks like this:
How I Try To Keep Up With The Data Tech World (A List of Data Blogs)
I do my best to try and keep, if not abreast of, then at least aware of what’s going on in the world of data. That includes RDBMS, Event streaming, stream processing, open source data projects, data engineering, object storage, and more. If you’re interested in the same, then you might find this blog useful, because I’m sharing my sources :)
Productivity tools: AI Image Generators
AI, what a load of hyped-up bollocks, right? Yet here I am, legit writing a blog about it and not for the clickbait but…gasp…because it’s actually useful.
Used correctly, it’s just like any other tool on your desktop. It helps you get stuff done quicker, better—or both.
Blog Writing for Developers
Writing is one of the most powerful forms of communication, and it’s useful in a multitude of roles and contexts. As a blog-writing, documentation-authoring, twitter-shitposting DevEx engineer I spend a lot of my time writing. Recently, someone paid me a very nice compliment about a blog I’d written and asked how they could learn to write like me and what resources I’d recommend.
Never one to miss a chance to write and share something, here’s my response to this :)
Authoring Wordpress blogs in Markdown (with Google Docs for review)
Wordpress still, to an extent, rules the blogging world. Its longevity is testament to…something about it ;) However, it’s not my favourite platform in which to write a blog by a long way. It doesn’t support Markdown to the extent that I want. Yes, I’ve tried the plugins; no, they didn’t do what I needed.
I like to write all my content in a structured format - ideally Asciidoc, but I’ll settle for Markdown too. Here’s how I stayed [almost] sane whilst composing a blog in Markdown, reviewing it in Google Docs, and then publishing it in Wordpress in a non-lossy way.
Using GitHub Actions to build automagic Hugo previews of draft articles
This blog is written in Asciidoc, built using Hugo, and hosted on GitHub Pages. I recently wanted to share the draft of a post I was writing with someone and ended up exporting a local preview to a PDF - not a great workflow! This blog post shows you how to create an automagic hosted preview of any draft content on Hugo using GitHub Actions.
This is useful for previewing and sharing one’s own content, but also for making good use of GitHub as a collaborative platform - if someone reviews and amends your PR the post gets updated in the preview too.
Scheduling Hugo Builds on GitHub pages with GitHub Actions
Over the years I’ve used various blogging platforms; after a brief dalliance with Blogger I started for real with the near-inevitable Wordpress.com. From there I decided it would be fun to self-host using Ghost, and then almost exactly two years ago to the day decided it definitely was not fun to spend time patching and upgrading my blog platform instead of writing blog articles, so headed over to my current platform of choice: Hugo hosted on GitHub pages. This has worked extremely well for me during that time, doing everything I want from it until recently.
Moving from Ghost to Hugo
Why? I’ve been blogging for quite a few years now, starting on Blogger, soon onto WordPress, and then to Ghost a couple of years ago. Blogger was fairly lame, WP yucky, but I really do like Ghost. It’s simple and powerful and was perfect for my needs. My needs being, an outlet for technical content that respected formatting, worked with a markup language (Markdown), and didn’t f**k things up in the way that WP often would in its WYSIWYG handling of content.