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

Posts tagged General

A key trick that makes search fast

It's interesting to think about internals sometimes

Recently I added a basic search page to my blog. This is a pure static site, hosted on Github Pages, so there's no Solr or Algolia here. Just some clever JavaScript (Lunr.js) acting on data generated by Statiq. Setting that up made me think about the internals of how a search can work efficiently, and I figured others might be interested in this...

General ~5 min. read

Blank white screen from local XM Cloud Rendering host?

No idea how I broke it, but do have one way to fix it...

There are some days when technology just doesn't want to play ball. And in my experience 99% of these days are when you're on a developer training course and its the exercise/labs machine that's being difficult. I had this recently on the XM Cloud developer intro course. I've no idea if anyone else would ever see this issue (or how it was caused) but it didn't return much useful info in Google, and I did find a way to fix for my problem. So it's documentation time...

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# ~7 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 ~4 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 ~6 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