I've been a passionate software developer for a very long time ... now I'm a tech-savvy IT manager and tinker with things like this blog in my free time ;)
Developing software never lets you go. It's a creative passion and for me it's the web that has fascinated me for almost 30 years.
My latest stuff is below and here is more about me. Meet me @kiko@indieweb.social.
Due to the fact, that nowadays everybody is talking about Dark Modes for Browsers and Operating Systems, in order to save battery or for easier reading (uhh, really?), I decided my blog should support that.
I work with several devices, some Windows, some Android, and sometimes I have time to write on my articles at home (Notebook, Tablet), in my spare time in the office (Desktop, Laptop) or on my way to somewhere (Smartphone). Right now I’m am in a barber shop, waiting for my haircut and write these lines. So, wherever I am, I need the Hexo project locally, but in sync on a digital device.
The blog is synced via Dropbox, but hosted on GitHub Pages, so on every device I need the publishing functions of Git too.
Hexo is a great tool to get quick results (see Part One of this series), when you decide to have a blog and its defaults are practical, but it’s power lies in the possiblities of customization via plugins. On the official plugin page, there are actually 302 plugins listed, but there are many more and no wish will be unsatisfied.
I will show you which of these I found worth to work with…
A few days ago I puzzled over a technical problem regarding SQL Server, Active Directory and Visual Studio Database Projects. With tips, hints and snippets from several websites I got it running and the solution was absolutely memorable. For myself and for others. Nothing is harder than to know ‘you did this before…’, but not to remember how.
Because of this strong leaning towards oblivion, I started over 20 years ago my very first website zerbit.de, manually crafted with Classic ASP and a SQL Server database as backend, with an editor, tagging, categories and so on. It was really exciting to build this blog from scratch and writing articles for it, but it was so time consuming to expand the features of the website and keep it running, that some day I quit it silently.
So, to document the solution mentioned above, I could use tools like OneNote or others, like in the past years, but this would be just for me and not for all developers, who have a similar problem. I felt it would be unfair to participate from the knowledge of others to get my solution and dont give something back.
I decided to write an article just in HTML and publish it on my personal GitHub Page that I didn’t used so far. Ok, just Text … ugly. Just a little CSS and a little more structure and maybe I should do something with Vue JS … STOP … It would be better to pick one of the cool new static website generators based on Node.js, to detain myself from inventing the wheel again and save my time to write articles. So I did a little research and found HEXO … Bingo! I can work with my favorite editor Visual Studio Code, its all HTML, JavaScript and CSS, I can write my articles in Markdown and Hexo has a lot of helpers for stuff Markdown doesn’t provide, it produces static files and works only with files, therefore no need for a database … and it is well documented.
If you are working with a Visual Studio Database Project and have to deal with data from the Active Directory via a Linked Server, you have to announce the data structure of the AD data in order to get the project compiled.