It's 1995, and a wiry-looking engineer in need of a haircut is working at a tech services company in the Channel Islands. The island is Jersey (you can see the French coastline on a clear day), and he's over here for a week or two for training from his nearby Guernsey home.

This company does everything from IBM AS/400 maintenance to custom PC software development - the developer involved was brought in and trained to work on a banking package on those AS/400s but has ended up on the PC development side through a series of improbable events.

If you've built a PC desktop in the last few years, you've probably been exposed to the confusing array of DDR4 information when it comes to buying RAM.

What it comes down to is not all RAM is created equal. Once you get past pin size and memory capacity, you'll have to filter down by speed. Speed isn't a simple one-figure number - you may see a rated speed like 2400MHz, but you may also see another bunch of numbers like 16-16-16-39 indicating the necessary clock cycles to perform certain types of memory operations.

Semantic versioning is a simple agreement on how packages should be versioned.

Semantic versioning (SemVer) gives package developers a framework to version their software and provides consumers of packages an expectation of how changes will be handled over time.

I started designing fonts around 1987 on an 8-bit Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Many years later, my involvement in the Spectrum emulation scene led aul Dunn to ask me if I could provide fonts for his excellent BASIN Sinclair BASIC for Windows. My interest in 8x8 fonts was suitably rekindled, and I ended up delivering about 60 - some even extracted from my original +3 disk images.

I wanted to get these fonts online earlier! Raw 7698-byte files, however, are only of use to BASIN users or those suitably familiar with the convoluted process and tools to get them into a Spectrum or emulator. Even trying to use them on Windows was a pain given that TrueType only cares about scalable fonts (SBIT embedded bitmaps are rare these days).

My site goes back to 2004 and is reasonably sized but not massive even with the comments, so waiting 30 seconds for a change to reflect is disappointing.

I investigated several options and ended up using a few in combination, skipping others and holding out for one.

Azure Pipelines has been interesting to me especially given the generous free open source tier and seemingly instant availability of build agents. The setup is easy if you're building .NET targets with lots of useful starters available.

Some areas have been frustrating, specifically build variables, the difficulty in getting the app installed, and the limitations on triggers if you can't (non-GitHub apps can't be installed on Enterprise accounts even if FREE).

The next stage is considering where to host the site and whether to use a content delivery network (CDN). My preferred approach on other sites has been to:

Adding the CloudFront CDN was essential if you wanted SSL with your domain name, but GitHub pages added support for SSL certs with custom domains

Jekyll does support categories and tags directly but doesn't support the pagination of categories and tag list pages. The Paginate-v2 gem does solve this - and also lets you tweak the URL format.

My site used the URL formats /blog/category/{category-name}/blog/category/{category-name} and /blog/tag/{tag-name}/blog/tag/{tag-name} with 4 articles per page and a little pager at the bottom offering some indication of what page you are on, and some navigation arrows like this:

Site search is a feature that WordPress got right. Analytics also tells me it is popular. A static site is at a disadvantage, but we have some options to address that.

My first consideration was to use Google Site Search alas it was deprecated last year. There are alternative options, but few are free. I agree that people should be paid for their services, something has to keep the lights on, but a small personal blog with no income stream can't justify this cost.