Markdown

I remember hearing about Markdown previously but hadn’t paid it much attention. Then I heard it mentioned on a podcast I listen to I also noticed that the Readme file on Visual Studio Team Services was done in markdown.

Naturally I was intrigued. As a wannabe programmer and configuration nazi the idea of using a simple markup syntax to write formatted documents sounded great. I had a brief stint using LaTeX while at school (no one else did though) and while I did do my final year project documentation with it, I quickly lost interest.

The blog

Anyway… I had thought about starting a blog for a while. I use Feedly every day and follow lots of blogs. Since I’ve benefited greatly from the community I thought it was time to give something back.

Getting back to the main topic of how this blog came about. I searched for blogging engines that supported Markdown and the first result on Google was Hexo. Hexo is a static site generator built using NodeJS. Seemed like a great fit for a backend guy like me.

I installed NodeJS using Chocolatey and followed the instructions to get up and running. Simple enough. The original plan was to host it on an Azure Web App, so I followed another set of instructions in order to do that.

Note that in the Azure portal you should use the deployment options instead of continuous integration. That’s where you find the Local Git repo option you need. I first tried the Free plan, but apparently custom domains are not supported on that, so I switched to the Shared plan. See more details here. I’ll probably move the blog to Github pages though since that’s free. Or I could host it on my router…

Once everything was setup all I need to do to update the blog, besides writing the posts, is hexo deploy --generate. I placed the blog source files in Dropbox so I can get to them wherever I am. This post was started on my phone and finished on an iPad. I can’t generate and deploy on the go though. I’m sure PowerShell can help, but that is another blog post I think. I’m thinking some kind of change monitoring and automated deployment.

Please note that I’m using this blog as another learning opportunity, so except changes, downtime etc. I’m also not sure how I active I’m actually going to be.