It may come as no surprise to the people who get emails from me, but I failed GCSE English. I loved reading, but I struggled to articulate my thoughts clearly and I struggled with basic grammar. It wasn't until I was 20 that I could explain a verb and a noun.... A good friend read my final year dissertation about Fraud Detection and his main comment was: "Did you learn how to use a semi-colon?"; No. I barely know how to use, a comma.
The web has always been a great place for me to explore writing and sharing my thoughts, and it was a large part in getting me a Developer Relations role at Google. This site is my own little corner of it that I can control. When I get the time, I try to write about things that I find interesting. You might find it interesting, you might not. I don't really mind, I just like to try and improve my writing.
I do get the occasional email from people who read my blog and they ask me how I write and edit my blog. I thought I would write a little bit about it.
My blog infrastructure is pretty simple. It's a mostly static site built with Hugo. I chose Hugo because it takes 3 seconds to build my entire site and I really value the rapid local building and near instant deployment. All of the other Ruby and JavaScript builders would take sometimes over a minute.
Because my site is not amazingly dynamic, I felt that I didn't really need Wordpress, but I did need a tool for editing.
The hosting is on Vercel, but I've no affinity for it. I just needed something that could host a static site and get it built and hosted in seconds (which Vercel does).
Because Hugo is mostly driven by Markdown I used a tool called SpinalCMS as my editor because it had a GUI and could import my archives, but there were a couple of bugs in it (It doesn't use a date format that works well with Hugo) and text editing (try delete past a paragraph). So I built a simple in about 30 minutes called... well, it doesn't really have a name it's just a URL https://blog-craft-editor-paulkinlan.replit.app/
The editor is just a static page that uses TipTap as the actual bit you write in (seriously, TipTap is a great editor API). I have some little bits around the editor that can load and save files back the the filesystem and suggest titles and descriptions, but that's it.
The only other thing is I have list of things that I've been meaning to complete. I may never actually complete any of these posts.
For the site itself, I really want to encourage people to speak to me, but there's not always a lot of engagement. I use commento.io and it works well.
And that's about it really.
I lead the Chrome Developer Relations team at Google.
We want people to have the best experience possible on the web without having to install a native app or produce content in a walled garden.
Our team tries to make it easier for developers to build on the web by supporting every Chrome release, creating great content to support developers on web.dev, contributing to MDN, helping to improve browser compatibility, and some of the best developer tools like Lighthouse, Workbox, Squoosh to name just a few.
I love to learn about what you are building, and how I can help with Chrome or Web development in general, so if you want to chat with me directly, please feel free to book a consultation.
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