I can remember working for a production house where clients would want to set up a blog on their business websites. They had read that a blog can increases traffic to your website and increase you’re Google presence. A blog is a great idea for businesses, it sounds great in practice – but only the dedicated ever wrote a regular post – the majority of businesses let there measly 3 or 4 posts go stale making there website look stale and uncared for. It came to a point where you would discourage customers from creating a blog as they don’t foresee the dedication and work involved in keeping it up. What was supposed to be a positive marketing tool for their businesses quickly can become a liability. This isn’t a business blog so I don’t risk negative marketing and i’m going into this knowing the dedication involved – so with that, lets give it a shot!
I’m not just making a blog for the sake of it, No… there is a purpose. It’s not to attract readers or to force my views on my readers. Recently I got a new job. I was fortunate that I was offered two jobs without even having to hand out my CV. However, if I did need to start handing out my CV to companies who were not familiar know my skills and abilities, I wouldn’t have much to show them. I’ve interviewed people in the past for job applications. I want to know there professional experience, see sample code and understand there programming philosophies – I want to make sure they are an asset and will work within the team.
Que this blog… This is a place that I can build my reputation professionally, prove that I have an understanding of my industry. I need to record my knowledge to show that my skill are continually improving, and demonstrate how I problem solve.
If you’re anything like me, you will be working out how I have made this blog. You will be disappointed, it’s not custom made, I cheated… I’m usually a custom build person. I write my code by hand in a plain old text editor. I decided if I am going to write a blog and contribute to it regularly I need something easy where I could just write and throw in a picture and know it’s worked. Wordpress was the obvious solution – I’ve not had much experience with word press in the past 7 years so was curios how it’s developed recently. Wordpress is powerful, you can achieve pretty much anything that you would ever need from a blogging system… but I would need to play around with each blog post, I didn’t want to have muck around each time. I decided to check out a hosted solution. I looked at Squarespace, Wix and finally Weebly. Squarespace is great but a little pricy. Wix has great reviews, but i looked at the html source code and eekkk… it was a mess. Weebly was last on the list, it’s less powerful than Wix but the pricing is good, it’s fast to reload pages and when I looked at the source code I was impressed considering it’s a templating drag and drop system. A blog post was quick to write and simple to change the text layout if I needed to.
So we’ve now covered that I am dedicated to writing a blog, my reason for writing a blog and the platform I’m using to write my blog… I’ve mentioned that the topic is surrounding my industry. I’m sure you have already guessed that I am a website developer. I am the senior developer for a moderately large company. Back end i’m running applications on PHP5 and PHP7, run MySQL 5 all from within docker containers. My front end contains applications written in both the jQuery and Angular JS. These are the fundamental technologies I work with on a day to day basis and will be the foundation topics for this blog. My Goal will be write a regular ‘report’ of whats new in the industry. Sure, there are probably plenty of these reports, but my reason is simple. If I have to write about it, then I have to research it and it encourages my own personal learning. I also want to write at least one weekly post about a struggle or solution around a problem i have had throughout the week.
So – I think i’ve finished what I wanted to note down… welcome to my blog, my first post!