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misc site_news

On the road again…

Using WordPress for my blog had been bugging me for quite some time. So I’ve started using the popular static site generator Jekyll and host my blog on GitHub pages. Main reasons for this were:

  • Security: Over time you install a lot of plugins and any number of them can come with vulnerabilities. Granted they are optional and they are installed because they provide nice functionality but it would be much better to delegate the security of the system to GitHub.
  • Maintenance: I used to host my blog on AWS which is relatively easy to maintain but still I was responsible for keeping that machine up and running at all times.
  • Database: Using a database is overkill when all I’m doing is generating some static content. Database comes with performance impact, maintenance and backup requirements.
  • Scalability: No need to worry about scaling as GitHub takes care of it all for free!
  • Versioning: Just like any project on GitHub you have full control over the content and you can rollback to a previous version anytime.
  • Performance: All content is served in static pages. So compared to retrieving it from the database and generating the page on the fly it’s obviously much faster and scalable.

Beautifying the content

Compared to HTML, markdown is so elegant and concise. No more pesky attributes and ugly tags mingled with text. Granted WordPress has plugins for writing posts in Markdown but in GitHub it’s a first-class citizen and supported from the get-go.

Drawbacks

  • WordPress has its own merits like having a gazillion of plugins and themes. GitHub Pages supports a limited number of plugins due to security reasons.
  • SEO must be taken care of manually whereas WordPress already has lots of plugins for that purpose too

Resources

dev csharp

yield keyword has been added to C# long time ago but I never made a habit of using it. Basically what it does is create an iterator and allows you to return an IEnumerable one item at a time.

For example in the example below (from MSDN) Power returns a single int. But the return type of the method is IEnumerable. This is because of the _yield_ usage. Every time it's called it returns the next value it calculates.

public class PowersOf2
{
    static void Main()
    {
        // Display powers of 2 up to the exponent of 8: 
        foreach (int i in Power(2, 8))
        {
            Console.Write("{0} ", i);
        }
    }

    public static IEnumerable<int> Power(int number, int exponent)
    {
        int result = 1;

        for (int i = 0; i < exponent; i++)
        {
            result = result * number;
            yield return result;
        }
    }

    // Output: 2 4 8 16 32 64 128 256
}

I developed a small Fibonacci calculator using yield.

Notice the first two occurences:

yield return f0;
yield return f1;

When it’s first called it returns f0 (0) and on second call it omits that return and returns f1 (1) and on subsequent calls it loops until the desired numbers and returns the series up until that point.

And the output looks like this:

Fibonacci console output

Resources

  • [MSDN Reference] (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/9k7k7cf0.aspx)

misc site_news

I know I’m late to the game but better late than never, right? Right? Anyway, I’ve decided to use markdown syntax in my blog from now on. So if I migrate it some day it would be easier as Markdown’s supported in many platforms.

I know at the end of the day it all boils down to HTML but I think it’s about time to force myself practice more Markdown and integrate it into my daily routines. Let’s see how it goes with the next posts!

Resources