I finally updated the blog! It's been five years since I last wrote because I haven't pritoritized writing on the blog over spending time on my family, work, or wasting time on Twitter or Facebook :-).

The site had evolved over the years. Originally it was a manually built site, then I used an ASP.NET based CMS called Graffiti. In 2016, I replaced the home page with a static page using one of the excellent themes from html5up.net.

I had been meaning to write a PowerShell based static site generator but in the end didn't get around to finishing it. While investigating which Markdown parsing library to use I ran across Markdig and then a static site generator called Wyam.io.

Coverting the old Graffiti site posts was a straightforward process of:

  1. Exporting the post content and metadata from the VistaDB data store using an evaluation copy of their tools to create XML. The blog content was in XHTML form.
  2. Insert the appropriate metadata into the YAML front matter for each post. One item to note here was that I had to use the YAML array syntax to deal with tags with spaces etc.
  3. Using Pandoc to convert from XHTML into Markdown content for each post.
  4. Build.

It was surprisingly easy.

Theme

I converted a different html5up.net theme, Stellar, into the system used by wyam.io - basically using a combination of Razor syntax and intrisic variables that wyam.io provides. I've created a github project for it, feel free to use it https://github.com/arebee/wyam-theme-stellar.

It still needs a little work, the nav bar isn't correct. But commit and update to make progress is my new motto ;-)