You may notice something looks a little different today…. welcome to the new look gavsto.com! The previous site was due a refresh, not just for content but also to bring a more modern look. You may have also noticed that a lot of the content that was in it has disappeared. I only bought certain pieces forward that I felt held substance and were of high quality.
As a digital pack-rat myself, I also recognise a lot of the content was still helpful to people - that’s why I have made it all still available at https://gavsto.com/404 - there’s a button and link here that will allow you to download all previous content in a markdown format, including attachments and images, that were in the previous blog.
Nerdy Web Host Stuff
The previous site ran on Wordpress, and had done for a very long time. For what I wanted to achieve here now, that wasn’t needed anymore. The new site is running on Jekyll and is actually published as to GitHub pages and served completely statically, which means it should in theory be rapid and fast. It was an interesting project to build up the deployment pipeline to allow me to simply push this markdown file into source control and have everything automatically build on GitHub’s side.
Automation with n8n
One of the things I knew I wanted to do, was provide all the content of my own blog. There’s many ways to deal with this but I took the opportunity to play with and learn n8n. n8n is a workflow automation platform that has lots of different nodes built in that allow you to different things. My challenge was to build a workflow that would allow me to take all posts in my previous wordpress blog, create a folder for each post, convert the posts to markdown, get all the links/images/attachments and put everything in a single folder. This was the workflow I ended up building:
The hardest part to work out here I think were the code nodes - extracting the file URLs and rewriting the image URLs so they would work with the Markdown. I quite like n8n, it’s a nifty tool and really easy and cheap to host an instance of it. They have some really interesting AI nodes too that are worth having a play about with.
Anyway - hope you like the new site look. I am excited to start sharing more resources and hopefully helpful articles.
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