Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I've wanted to add some logic to this site to display article headings as navigation for a while. And I've also been thinking it would be helpful if you were able to link directly to headings. Pleasingly the Statiq engine makes doing this pretty simple, so here's how my attempt works:
It struck me recently that there are a few places in this blog where I linked to pages I know will disappear over time. The examples that started me thinking about this were the Symposium and SUGCON websites that get published each year. They tend to reuse the same domain names from year to year without archiving the old content. So those links go stale fairly quickly, and posts from years back now point to this year's events by default. So I started wondering if I could fix this issue automatically...
The second idea on my "little things I'd meant to add to this blog for a while" list was reading time estimates. Like the reading progress indicator from before, this shouldn't be tricky, and in this case I wanted to write it down in case anyone else working with Statiq was interested in achieving something similar on their site.
I'd had the idea that I should add a "reading progress" indicator to my blog posts for a while now, and I finally got around to adding it the other weekend. What I'd assumed would be a five minute job had an interesting issue I thought I should document for others...
I noticed the other week that the sitemap file my blog was generating included the urls, but none of the other metadata that they can report. To be honest, I'm not sure if search engines pay much attention to this these days, but since the schema for the files includes other options I decided to see if I could add them.
One of the side-effects of being pretty old, and having been around The Internet for some time is that every so often I get to be the Old Man Shouting at Clouds over things I think went wrong along the way. (Or "progress" as people sometimes call it) And one thing that's really struck me recently is how Blogs have changed in recent years...
One of the challenges you often deal with using software that's under active development, is that as you take the lastest updates you can find that they subtly change (or break) the behaviour of the tool - affecting stuff that used to work for you. I had a classic example of this recently with this blog. An update to the Statiq engine fixed something in the core library code and created a subtle issue for my website. Since the docs for Statiq don't make this obvious, here's some information for anyone else finding this problem:
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:
I realised recently that I've become quite used to way many web forms let you paste image data straight into a text field. The behaviour of "upload the image data, and insert the correct mark-up for the image" is a really helpful shortcut when you're editing DevOps tickets, or Stack Overflow answers. So I started wondering how easy it would be to add that to the text editing tool I use for writing these blog posts. Turns out, not too hard, because WPF has some helpful extension patterns...
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:
