Michael Sync

Michael Sync

Crisp, minimal personal blog

06 Aug 2021

Rebuilding my blog (COVID Edition)


Covid Suck!

The Covid has changed our way of life. We can’t do things that we used to do (e.g. travel) but we can do things that we didn’t have time to do before. (e.g. DIY renovation, fitness and etc.) I’ve done a lot of different things since the Covid started last year. We have many tough lockdowns on and off in Melbourne. It has been tough but I appreciated that we still have the stable income, good process for the covid (free testing, free vaccination, medical support, financial support and etc.). As the start of Melbourne lockdown 6.0 today, I am going to do bring my little blog back to life.

My blog way way back

Here is what I think I am going to do.

  • Setup the repo ✔️
  • Setup the CICD pipeline ✔️
  • Move to new static blog engine ✔️
  • Migration 🕒 There are 453 posts in my old blog but I don’t think I can bring all of my posts back. They are screwed up when converting the Wordpress blog post to Markdown posts during the migration. Some of them are not even relevant anymore. I fixed around 10 posts now. I will probably bring one or two post a week if the post is still relevant or has some sentimental value.
  • Let Google knows - ✔️ My blog used to have Google PageRank 5 or 6. When I shut down my blog and close my Dreamhost account, Google removed all of my links from Google search. So I have to submit my sitemap again to Google.
  • Setup Google Analytics ✔️
  • New posts - There are a few posts pending. Whenever I found the problem/solution at, I used to email to myself with the title [TOBLOG]. I will post about them here after cleaning up some sensitive information. I will also post about other things that I do. e.g DIY, fitness, cars, kids and etc. It’s a personal blog after all. I am aiming to post at least one post a week this year.

My Nano blog posts in Email

  • Comment Section - ✔️ I decided to remove the comments from all of my posts. I think I have around 800+ comments in my old blog. I understand that having the comment section in your blog allows your user to give some feedback or ask questions or communicate with the other readers. But the static blog engine doesn’t comes with default commenting features. (Static comment for Hugo) Some people uses Disqus but I don’t want to use it. So I decided to disable it.
  • Feed/RSS/Email notification: I used to use Feedburner and have the followers around 200-300 but not sure what to use now. I will have to check later.
  • SEO - I used to have 1500-2000 view per day. A lot of things have been changed in the SEO world. I will have to catch-up.

That’s for now. Stay turned. Stay safe.

COVID - Stay safe, Stay home, Saves lives