Is This Thing On?

My first blog post!

Ronald Martin

3 minute read

Google Analytics - Pre-Site Revamp

Welcome to my Blog!

This site is being built with Hugo, an awesome, Go-based static site generator.

Since I work primarily on mobile platforms, what little I do know about web development has fallen off the wayside in the past couple of years. Hopefully, I can use this experience to catch up with the current state of affairs in webdev world. Using a static site generator perhaps isn’t quite the same as building a site from scratch, but let’s not reinvent the wheel, right?

Makin’ Blog Posts

The syntax for creating a new post uses the following command:

hugo new relative/path/to/content.md

For future reference, the docs are here: http://gohugo.io/content/types/.

Wow, I’ve Learned Things Already?

While this is my first post, I’ve already learned a few things that never came up while building apps:

  1. What is TOML?
  2. There are so many static site generators. I ended up choosing Hugo for a few reasons, the main one being that its written in Go (which I would like to learn eventually). It helps that the documentation is quite thorough.
  3. I had no idea that people actually visited my website. The screencap above from Google Analytics was for the Jekyll-based autogeneratred GitHub Page that this Hugo site is replacing. What’s with those weird spikes last week? Maybe now that I’ve decided to add some content, more people will visit! Before deciding to revamp my website, I hadn’t really worked with Google Analytics before. It was enormously easy to sign up, get a tracking ID, and enter it into GitHub Pages’ site generator to come up with the data you see here. I highly recommend doing so!
  4. Go HTML Templates are pretty easy to use.
  5. Managing a domain: I’ve never had one before, so it was surprisingly easy to buy a couple (I used Namecheap) and point them at my GitHub page. Easy, free hosting with great docs. Thanks, GitHub.
  6. What SASS, LESS, and SCSS are.

Even if I never write another blog post, this has already been an amazing learning experience. And, if I hadn’t written this post, I probably wouldn’t have noticed I’d learned this much!

I really like learning though, so my tentative goal is to try to write something at least once a week, even if its just a check-in type of post.

Other Stuff I Want to Learn

I’m going to continue building out this site to learn some of the following:

  1. Using Hugo with Gulp and SCSS
  2. Go, the programming language
  3. Go, the board game
  4. Disqus comment integration with Hugo

Blog Content Ideas

There are a lot of things I’d like to write about, and they aren’t limited to programming topics.

  • Android Studio 2.2 introduces recordable UI tests, fresh out of Google I/O just about a year after Apple introduced them in Xcode. How do they compare?
  • Touchable image maps in Android (in conjunction with Dean and my Star Wars: Rebellion app)
  • I have a secret music blog, but I’m considering making it not secret and posing music things here instead.

If you have any ideas, please feel free to contact me. Until I get the comment system set up, my email is in the sidebar.

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