Miscellaneous on Nicola Suter

How I migrated my Ghost blog to Jekyll

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Another migration of my blog? After running it for almost three years I thought it’s time for another change. The Ghost platform introduced a lot of changes and updates (with features that I don’t need) and caused me quite some expenses on my Azure subscription (around 50$ each month). Furthermore I wanted someting looking more clean with more focus on the writing part without a lot of fancy add-ons and functionalities. But it still had to cover features like tag summaries, yearly archive and a site search (Ghost doesn’t ship with those features out of the box). Because static sites seem to be a thing now I thought let’s hop onto the static site generator train.

I did some subjective research and decided that it will be Jekyll. I’ve chosen Jekyll because it’s quite easy to understand compared to hugo. Although hugo offers GraphQL which allows you to generate blog posts basically from any source including a REST API and Ghost has such an API in place which provides access to all posts.

To sum up the evolution of my blog:

2017 - 2018: Wordpress (hosted on a free hoster)
2018 - 2020: Ghost (hosted on Azure)
2020 - 20xx: Jekyll (hosted on GitHub Pages)

Since the beginning of my blog I had my DNS zones running on Cloudflare including CDN features. When I migrated from Wordpress to Ghost I also migrated the comments to Disqus -> so for this migration I didn’t need to change anything regarding comments.

Blogging year 2019 in numbers

Sat, 04 Jan 2020 14:53:14 +0000

Most of the people out there blogging have recently published numbers and figures about 2019. Starting the new decade I also want to publish some figures about 2019 and wish you a happy and successful start into 2020.

Blog
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On my blog I tried to focus mainly on Enterprise Mobility + Security topics and shared some experiences and how-to’s about the modern workplace.

28 blog posts published
101'074 page visits
04:08 (mm:ss) is the average time users spent on my site

Tools
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I published two open source tools in 2019, both are available on GitHub and both of them support your Microsoft 365 based workplace:

The Modern Workplace Concierge is a helper tool to simplify Microsoft 365 configuration allowing bulk import and export operations. Project URL
The Intune Drive Mapping Generator creates PowerShell scripts to map your on premises file shares to Intune MDM managed devices. Project URL

More numbers
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2 sessions on community events
254 new followers on twitter
423 commits on GitHub
802 generated network drive mapping configurations (Intune Drive Mapping Generator)

Final words
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I really appreciate all the feedback and support I received from you and fellow readers. Also in 2020 I will try to blog as much as possible and giving the community something back while representing the message that even at a young age you can contribute to the community, share your knowledge end especially learn a lot because this is a lifelong and ongoing process.

SwissSkills some thoughts about this years competition

Sat, 15 Sep 2018 18:19:38 +0000

That’s it. Saturday morning, the day after my SwissSkills 2018 competition in Bern. Waiting for a call to answer even though I know that my performance was not good enough to deserve a podium spot.

Update, 16.09.2018: the rankings are now available and I made it to the fourth place. Missing third by 0.05 points (!)

My journey
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Last year I had the privilege to compete at the national ICT skills after qualifying through the regional championships. I went there with no expectations I just wanted to know where I stand amongst others. In the end I was overwhelmed with the 3rd place.

With this achievement a few things had changed. I’ve gotten new opportunities regarding my job, had the chance to attend great events and had a confidence boost to finish my apprenticeship.

Because of my 3rd place last year I was automatically qualified to compete this year at the SwissSkills in Bern. Now I had expectations and wanted to qualify myself for the upcoming WorldSkills in Kazan.

The SwissSkills competition
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I went to the event with a good feeling and felt confident. I had prepared myself well - even better than last year and I wanted this podium spot so badly. During the competition I was realizing that just because you want something it doesn’t have to mean that you will get it. No matter how much you want it. I gave my very best but approximately after 5 hours into the competition I had trouble to focus properly and was unable to concentrate. Of course the tasks were difficult but not at an unsolvable level.

Miscellaneous on Nicola Suter

How I migrated my Ghost blog to Jekyll

Blogging year 2019 in numbers

Blog #

Tools #

More numbers #

Final words #