Started blog

Over the years I have on occasions, after apparently successfully explained how something works or figured out what is broken in a production or development environment, been told that I should do a blog explaining such things. It has been on the bucket list for a long time to do so, and finally it happened!

So who will be writing these posts? Primarily me, Markus Eriksson, who has been in the technology space for +20 years (closer to 30 depending on when counting begins, but let's not count) and runs the company MEEQIT (Markus Eriksson EQ IT) that sells professional services for, and related to, Microsoft 365.

What will the blog posts be about? Tech related for sure, and most of it likely about my areas of expertice in Azure, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Copilot, .NET and Powershell, but since I am a tinkerer in general you should not be surprised if every now and then there is a post about how to do a custom resource_pack for your dedicated Minecraft server, how to get your off-the-grid solar panels + battery combination to be managed using Home Assistant or on how to get something running on a Raspberry Pi.

Let's start with what this blog runs on. Azure Static Web Apps. Great stuff from Microsoft. Years ago I had made a note that I should try out Gatsby after seeing how smooth it could be to build a blog using Gatsby and deploy to Azure Static Web App.

Now, this site is built using VuePress. What happened? I have started to use a ARM64 Windows 11 device as my main driver and it seems Gatsby does not support latest versions of Node.js so I ended up having to downgrade to versions that apparently does not fly as well on ARM64 and the aftermath of that was dependency mayhem that I did not have the energy to sort out. Next in line that also appeared to meet my requirements of allowing me to do blog post pages in markdown, supports internationalization (wanted Swedish versions of pages) and documented deployment support to Azure Static Web Apps was VuePress.

I quickly selected the awesome VuePress Plume Theme and getting up and running using it was truly smooth sailing. Perhaps a little too smooth sailing, as I later realized that the language support was limited to only a few lanuguages and not Swedish. I will stick to doing posts in English for now and look into adding versions in my native language Swedish later...

Hold on now. Are you not a Microsoft techie? Why are you not using their frameworks for the blog site? Well, https://meeqit.se is already all in on Blazor and it is much more fun treading into unknown territory than repeating what you already know.