thealmostengineer.com

Problem

Earlier version was hosted on Blogger. The problem with using a platform that was provided by someone else, is that you are limited to what you can do on that platform. I wanted to make money from the content that I created on my blog.

The first version of the blog with this new setup, ran on Drupal 7, a content management system. The problem with using a content management system for a blog or website, is that you have to keep the code that runs that system up to date on the latest and greatest version. Otherwise you risk having the website compromised. With updates coming out almost weekly or bi-weekly, I found myself spending more time

Solution

I created thealmostengineer.com to be the next generation of my blog. By having a blog that hosted on a properitary platform, this allowed me the freedom to do what I chose with the blog, including monetizing content, customizing the appearance of the blog, and more.

Current version of this blog has the content generated by a static site generator called MkDocs. The pages, are written in Markdown format in text files. When ready to make changes to the website, the generate site command is ran and the Markdown files are used to create static HTML files. Those HTML files are then loaded to the production web host. The deployment process is handled entirely by Github Actions.

Technology

• Mkdocs (static site generator)
• Github Actions (for automated deployments)
• Github (for version control and backup)
• .NET 6 (weather data logged to blog and automated testing)