Rebranding the blog
29 Sep 2019I’m rebranding this blog for personal content only — no more tutorials. Future posts will just be my personal thoughts, opinions, and reflections.
All my old tutorials have been moved to a new domain, so they’re still accessible for people who use them. It’s just that this website will be tutorial-free.
History
I started writing programming tutorials in late 2015 under the domain coding123.org. I wanted to share what I had learned, as well as gain experience maintaining a blog.
Originally it was a WordPress site. I designed a theme from scratch (well, from underscores), and wrote posts about problems I had solved that I couldn’t find solutions for elsewhere.
This strategy worked quite well and I was soon getting a consistent ~250 organic searches a day. But over time I stopped posting so much. I went from posting an article a week, to an article a quarter, to an articles a year. My focus had shifted to participating in open source, which left coding123 under-loved.
In 2017 I decided I needed a site that was linked to me. Since most of my posts were under coding123, I moved them over to a new domain (eddyerburgh.me). I also moved the blog over to Jekyll so that I could host it on Netlify.
Maybe moving my tutorials to my personal branded blog was a good move — the reason I was contacted by Manning to write a book was because they read the tutorials I had written on my blog. But then, they probably would have found my email through coding123.org too. Either way, it meant that my personal site was now full of impersonal tutorials.
Rebranding
Not long after the move, I realized that my personal blog didn’t contain much personal content. I wanted my blog to be a place that people could visit to get an understanding of who I am, my values, and my beliefs. Instead they would get tutorials on testing Vue components.
I put off moving the tutorials for a long time, but yesterday I decided to finally do the work. It didn’t take long at all. I’m always amazed by how quickly I can setup a new static site using Netlify (apart from updating my DNS nameservers it literally takes less than five minutes).
I’ve moved the tutorials to a different site and added redirects from this domain to the new domain. I’ll keep the redirects up for a long time (a mistake I made when moving from coding123.org to eddyerburgh.me was only leaving redirects up for a few months. Now there are a few more broken links on the web).
Future
I don’t plan to write any more tutorials. Right now I’m spending my time taking CS notes (see Edd’s notes), working on open source, and writing in-depth posts on data structures (see Data structures in practice).
I’ll continue hosting the tutorials and redirects from this domain to the new domain for as long as the tutorials remain useful.
All in all, I’m looking forward to writing for my new, more focussed, more personal blog.