Hello! Welcome to my new blog!

This is the first post here, so go easy on me!

So, why launch a new site, and why use the solutions that I have do it?

Ok, so, lets take a step back. I have been creating content for a long time, about technology, leadership, and code along with other random interest projects. I’ve been publishing these across a few different content sites, mostly my exiting blog site, www.mccran.co.uk. That site was put together a LONG time ago, using Coldfusion, also an Adobe product now, and some community apps and plugins. As is normal for a developer I gradually customized it so much that it was no longer compatible with the core releases, so upgrades became hard, with many hours of merging and reapplying customizations. I had, in effect, created a site full of technical debt. Which ironically, I spend quite a bit of time talking about with partners and customers, as an Architecture principle to avoid.

So, with Covid, and Lockdown, and the last few years of career movements, this seemed like an ideal opportunity to move to a new platform. Partly for a clean start with content more aligned to my current state of life, and normal activities, and partly as it was nice to stretch my tech legs and learn a new solution.

So why pick WordPress?

A couple of reasons really, firstly I wanted something away from the workplace. I have been learning Adobe software inside out for a few years now, and sometimes its nice to broaden your horizons. So, despite knowing Adobe Experience manager well, I decided it was out. Also, I plan on integrating a few other Adobe solutions into this site, whatever flavor it ended out in. I run a lot of tech webinars discussing how easy it is to integrate Adobe solutions into other platforms, so this was a good excuse to have an ‘other’ platform.

I also had joint goals of learning something new but avoiding setting up the same systems I had before, i.e., something that I would jump into and customize to the point of being unique and unaligned with the core product roadmap. So, a key principle was to know enough to get it done, but not enough to get under the hood and start customizing.

Also, to avoid the issues I built into my old site, I wanted something off the shelf, with a solid community behind it, with a raft of plugins and hosting options. After a quick bit of analysis, WordPress is by far the largest, most adopted platform out there.

So here we are. It’s been an interesting journey over the last few weeks. The core of the site was done in a day or two, and as per my old days leading an agency team, I’ve been finessing the odd icon or page for far too long. Sure, there is the odd page missing, but I'll get to that.

So now it is time to crack on with content. My Trello ‘articles to blog’ category is overburdened with topics to get out of my brain, so expect more soon!