Welcome to My New, New Home

So, last year I started blogging again after a seven-year hiatus. I had started my first blog when I was first learning C# and .Net as a means of documenting my learning experience for the benefit of myself and others. I’d started it on Blogger, which was one of the bigger platforms at the time, and named it, appropriately, “Learning C# and .Net”. That effort lasted a year before family and work commitments eliminated available blogging time, and thus my blog languished while I continued to learn.

When I returned to blogging, after having spent nearly 5 awesome years at Microsoft learning a tonne, I wanted to move on from the theme of my first blog. Not that I’ve ever stopped learning - I’ll do that the day I die - but I wanted to cover slightly more advanced stuff than the theme would suggest. So I started a new blog on Blogger, because that was what I knew, and called it “Drew’s Adventures in Code”. It was only a month or two later that I discovered Eric Lippert’s wonderful blog of nearly the same name. Oh well.

So that second blogging effort lasted a whole 3 months. I’m really good at this. I had fun writing some articles about deconstructors and object initialisers in C# 7.0, and then, again got busy in life and didn’t manage to continue. A contributing factor, too, was my frustration with formatting code in HTML. Even using Live Writer this was a pain.

So, in February this year I had some stuff I thought would be good to write about, but I didn’t really want to do it on Blogger. I had read Phil Haack’s story of moving his blog to GitHub Pages and Jekyll, and thought it sounded like a good idea. Blogging in Markdown with git for versioning; what could be better? I decided to rehome my blog on GutHub Pages and pull across all the content from Blogger under the one site. Setting up GitHub Pages was fairly straightfoward, as was getting Jekyll installed and configured on my machine. I still didn’t have a lot of free time so figuring out the import of my old blog posts took a while. I made the mistake of wanting everything to look perfect, and so my efforts faded once again.

Now I’ve got some stuff I want to write, and I’ve decided that good enough is good enough. So I’m relaunching my blog with the old content imported, but not in the best shape. I’ll work on cleaning it up over time. For now though, I want to write some articles about common misuses of System.Random. So that’s where I’ll spend my time.

Hopefully I’ll be a little more productive in this new environment, and I’ll be able to keep things going a little longer this time round.