After a lot of deliberation and consideration I’ve decided it’s time to refine (slightly) where I keep what on my sites. In the past I’ve maintained two primary web-presences: TechDistortion and TEN. The problem was that I didn’t feel like grouping all of my podcasts together under a single site in 2015 made sense, so I kept older pre-TEN episodes of shows under TechDistortion, with only newer episodes kept on TEN. The other problem was that TD had blog posts on a wide variety of topics including Statamic guides, cartooning (it was a brief fancy for a while), tech-related blog posts and engineering-related blog posts.
Under this grouping, someone visiting TD would find podcasts, articles/posts on a huge variety of topics and a few references to TEN, and someone visiting TEN would find podcasts and the occasional TEN-specific post, but miss some back-catalogues of shows. Based on years of feedback and with the excuse of migrating away from Statamic, I’ve finally finished re-organising my online web miscellaney as follows…
TEN
The Engineered Network TEN will now be the sole repository for all podcasts I’ve ever made, past and present with a new archived section that contains all past episodes of shows long since ended. The hosts and guests list has been extended to include all shows, past and present. I intend to do more with TEN in the future including transcriptions and transcription search which I am determined to complete. (For those receiving the NewsLetter, you already know the sad story there…)
Control System Space
A new site launched in August this year, it’s focus is completely engineering-specific articles called Control System Space. (I’m going through a ‘space’ phase clearly…) In truth it was my first real attempt at a Hugo website and since then I’ve learned a lot. I’ll probably revisit/tweak/refine it in coming months but the intentions behind it are three-fold:
- Be a repository for professional White-Papers, supporting independent knowledge-sharing in Control Systems Engineering
- Remove J-O-B “job” related posts from TechDistortion and keep them together in a single place
- Be a professional-facing outlet that I can direct those to with whom I work with or the greater CSE industry
As a litmus test I posted two articles on LinkedIn, and distributed links within the organisation both in and beyond the Automation Systems Team at work and they were well visited and very well received. In this way engineers that are less interested on my thoughts on Apple or Microsoft will see the most heavily polished, relevant articles for them.
TechDistortion
TD will remain for blog posts however there will be no podcast episodes and no engineering-specific articles there any more. In addition the whole site has been completely redone in a newer darker-high contrast view with all articles merged into a common article feed.
The Future
It’s been an interesting journey from Static (1996) to Dynamic (WordPress 2000s) to Statmic (2013-2018) to Static again (Hugo 2018-?) but with everything I’ve learned along the way, the tools we use aren’t always as important as the content, but with Hugo my life is easier, site maintenance is easier, sites are more responsive and reliable and that should leave more time for content. And now with the content hopefully more logically grouped by type and audience, anyone visiting will be more likely to find exactly what they’re looking for.