Jeremy Davis
Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
Page printed from: https://blog.jermdavis.dev/tags/general

Posts tagged General

Does Bing dislike Cloudflare?

Can't say for certain, but it certainly correlates...

I started migrating my writings off WordPress and over to this GitHub Pages site towards the end of 2021. And since I've done that I've not been able to get any search coverage of this site in Bing. But suddenly it seems to be starting to work. And it's looking like it might be related to CloudFlare...

Getting tweets (and toots) as images for my blog

Because those other social platforms might not be around forever

Since the whole "Twitter's in something of a downward spiral" thing kicked off, I'd been musing over the idea that having embedded tweets in my blog might not be such a good thing long term. What happens if the mad billionaire at the helm suddenly decides that embedding tweets should be a paid feature, or the site has a long outage? The best alternative I had was to turn the tweets into images - so obviously I investigated how I could automate this. Turns out it was a fun feature to add to my blog editor...

General C# ~6 min. read

Xref links in recent Statiq versions

Something changed, and it broke my build...

I updated the build project for this blog recently, as the engine used to generate it was updated. But doing that caused an issue which I think others might bump into. So here's an explanation of what I saw and how to fix it:

Statiq General ~3 min. read

A blog migration story

Why this solution?

It's been a while coming, but over the last couple of months I've finally gone throught the process of migrating my blog content off WordPress and onto a statically hosted site. A few people have asked me why I'd go to the trouble of doing this, so while I'm having a festive break from proper Sitecore stuff, I thought I should write about my reasoning:

General Statiq ~5 min. read

What happened to my “item:deleted” event?

My QA team had a deployment issue recently, where Azure DevOps failed to successfully release to a couple of servers. The reason for the failure wasn't obvious to me immediately, so here's a quick write-up for Google, in the hope it saves some other people.

An interesting diversion into procedural generation...

Outside of work I've been looking for non-Sitecore things to experiement with recently, and my eye was caught by a bit of interesting game development technology. I came across a discussion of using code to generate game data with a technique called "Wavefunction Collapse". It's a simple concept, but it has some interesting results, so I thought I'd have a go at an implementation myself.

General ~4 min. read

I got asked how I do the demos in my presentations...

After I presented at a couple of user groups recently, some people asked me about how I organised the video demos in my deck. It's a question I've been asked a few times over the years, so I figured this might be a good time to answer it...

General User Groups ~9 min. read

Numbered lists in Word

While developers would love to avoid ever writing documentation or reports, it happens to us all. One of the most frustrating bits of this can be getting the formatting to work as you'd like in Word – and I got bitten by this recently. So, as a memory jogger for my future self, here's how to deal with misbehaving heading numbers:

General ~1 min. read

Two gotchas installing a Java Runtime manually

Having spent some time deploying instances of Java for Solr servers recently, I came across two things that wasted my time. So...

General Solr ~2 min. read

Clearing up a little confusion with Let's Encrypt's DNS challenges

I love that lead to some fun... So I moved eagerly to Let's Encrypt when the tooling supported Windows reasonably well, and set myself up with a certificate with multiple SANs authenticated via their "HTTP proofs" mechanism, and it all worked fine, despite it being a bit of a pain that I had to expose port 80 for sites I only wanted accessible via port 443.

But I realised recently that they now offer wildcard certs that would make my life simpler, and that there is now decent support for DNS-based proof-of-ownership. So recently I tried moving my server over to this model – and there was a bit of friction. Entirely PEBCAK though – so I'm writing this down for the next time I forget how DNS works 😉

General ~1 min. read