Published Dec 19, 2014 by Lee Briggs
For a long time, I ran a blog, wiki and static website on a VPS which I managed. As I finished education and started in the work force, I realised that managing a server in my spare time just wasn’t fun anymore, and the website and blog fell into disarray. You can’t spend that much time worrying about SSH hardening, config management for Apache and other medial tasks when all you want to do is write a blog post or update your resume.
Alongside this, I realised I spend a lot of time in Git, a lot of time editing and parsing JSON and a lot of time writing ruby code and it was becoming second nature. Blame the DevOps movement if you want, but the “System Administrator” role just isn’t the same thing it was even 5 years ago when I started out, and I wanted my time to be spent doing these things that I did daily, rather than worrying if my server had been hacked and regular patches.
Today I decided I’d had enough, and went “full devops” on my personal spaces. In all honesty, I kinda wish I’d done it sooner. Writing this blog post was just about the easiest thing I’ve done in a long time. Here’s what I did.
The first thing I need to do was replace the old Wordpress blog with something I can actually use on a daily basis. I wanted something that supported Markdown, as it’s a format I’m familiar with and use every day. I also wanted something that would work with minimal fuss, and could be hosted elsewhere. Jekyll filled all these criteria, and when I discovered (like many before me) that I could host the content on Github Pages, use a CNAME from my main URL, AND it was written in ruby, it was a no brainer. Getting started was really easy.
It was so easy, I wondered why the hell I’d been messing around with PHP/MySQL and Apache!
Once I’d done that, I wanted to add this post. So I added a _posts directory, created a file with the format YYYY-MM-DD-title.md and started hacking away.
It’s useful to be able to see what your posts look like while you’re writing them, so I installed the jekyll gem and and then served up the page localy
sudo gem install jekyll
bundle install
bundle exec jekyll serve
You can see the post as you edit it at http://localhost:4000.
My website has acted as my online resume and presence for a long time, and moving to Jekyll meant that functionality had gone. In order to keep with the git based theme, I’ve moved it to the opensource JSONResume format.
The JSON resume project is basically, as you would expect, a schema definition for resumes. What makes it interesting is that it comes with a tool, resume-cli and an hosting repository which is bundled into it, the JSON Resume Registry as well as an online editor.
This whole ecosystem really took the pain out of updating my CV. First, I installed the tool:
npm install -g resume-cli
I used used the resume-cli to generate a template inside my git repository
resume-cli init
I used the schema to fill out all the relevant details, and then picked a theme from those available. Once I was done, I can publish the resume for easy viewing with the resume-cli:
resume-cli publish --theme elegant
Again, like Jekyll, you can see how this all looks locally before publishing:
resume-cli serve --theme elegant
I think the result looks great and I can easily generate a PDF for emailing if needs be, even with a different theme:
resume-cli export --theme elegant --format pdf
The final step, and most difficult, was replacing my Wiki. I still haven’t replaced my beloved dokuwiki which really allowed me to keep some stuff I need seperate, and some leave some things in the public domain. I’ve contemplated simply using a Github Wiki but it doesn’t allow you to keep things locked down, which is really important for me to document things like how I configure XYZ. I don’t want anyone seeing my exact preferred apache configuration, for example.