Ravi S. Iyer: Software Development

Last updated on 15 May 2024 https://jekyllrb.com/ "Markdown, Liquid, HTML & CSS go in. Static sites come out ready for deployment." .. " GitHub Pages is powered by Jekyll, so you can easily deploy your site using GitHub for free—custom domain name and all." Nice text tutorial about using Jekyll to create a blog site. The associated github repo is shared and one can run the app to see the blog site in operation. I have not tried out Jekyll coding but just browse-reading through the article and github repo and checking out the blog app, has given me some idea of how Jekyll can be used to more easily create static sites which use a shared layout. There is support for templates too but I don't know how extensive this support is, and whether the free templates collection is sophisticated enough for various static website needs. The article: Jekyll Tutorial: How To Create a Static Website, https://kinsta.com/blog/jekyll-static-site/ . Gatsby (software), https://e...

https://www.free-css.com/free-css-templates https://templatemo.com/ (has free and premium) https://themewagon.com/ https://html5up.net/ (has free and premium) https://startbootstrap.com/themes https://www.zerotheme.com/ (has free and premium) https://www.html5xcss3.com/ https://www.w3schools.com/w3css/w3css_templates.asp https://www.tooplate.com/free-templates   Note that OceanWP free theme on WordPress.org has a collection of templates which seem to be quite impressive. But the problem seems to be that these templates have to be used only in WordPress environment and cannot be used in an HTML & CSS static website.

Last updated on 14 May 2024 Summary After some stumbling on WAMP installation on my local Windows PC and some exploration of individual authors' instructions for installation of XAMPP (instead of WAMP) and WordPress.org on local Windows PC, I was successful in installing and running WordPress locally without spending any money (free). I could also install a plugin (Elementor) in it for free which is not allowed in WordPress.com free plan. As of now, I do not know how useful the free plugins, themes and templates in WordPress.org are, and whether one needs paid plugins, themes and templates to build decent quality websites and small to medium complexity web apps, but I hope to learn about that and also document that learning in a post in the future. In contrast to WordPress.org, I think WordPress.com free plan is very inadequate to build websites let alone web apps.  Even after one creates the WordPress website or web app., hosting it may involve some additional expense as one would...

Last updated on 14 May 2024 Notes WordPress only content of this post has been moved to  Free Wordpress.org installation on local Windows PC is tricky but doable; Exploring using it for creating websites . But this post does have more general content about CMS some of which covers WordPress too. Related post: Notes about Static Site Generators: Jekyll, Gatsby, Next.js,  https://raviswdev.blogspot.com/2024/05/notes-about-static-site-generators.html Related post: Notes on: Hand-code simple/medium complexity static websites in HTML, CSS and JavaScript or use a website builder or static site generator?,  https://raviswdev.blogspot.com/2024/05/notes-on-handcoding-static-websites.html Headless CMS explained in 1 minute (the text article takes longer, the video link in it is 1 minute 15 secs. long): https://www.contentful.com/headless-cms/ Nice article that seems to give a good overview of various types of web(site/app) development. Article was "was originally publishe...

Last updated on 8 Sep. 2024 Today (8 May 2024) I finished a first round of the official Next.js tutorial:  https://nextjs.org/learn . The resultant app is deployed on Vercel with valid user credentials being: Email: user@nextmail.com, Password: 123456. A related post is:  Notes on learning Next.js - 1st round and 2nd round . [8 Sep. 2024 update: The previously mentioned post also covers a second round of studying the official Next.js tutorial which was from 18 May 2024 to 23 May 2024. end-8 Sep. 2024 update] The final tutorial app. demonstrates quite a few interesting features like optimized fonts and images that avoid CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), streaming and loading skeletons, search using database query instead of client side filtering, pagination, React Server Actions to mutate data, graceful error handling, authentication using NextAuth.js and adding metadata to app. The app. has tons of code with TypeScript and Tailwind code being somewhat new to me and so  a l...

Last updated on 5 Mar. 2025 5 Mar. 2025 Update I am too squeezed for time to update this post. The latest scripts are available on my public GitHub repo:  https://github.com/ravisiyer/PS-Scripts  . end- 5 Mar. 2025 Update Quick-Info ExcludeDirsRecurseListFilesDirs.ps1 : Recursively outputs Get-ChildItem returned object for files and directories of current working directory OR user specified directory but excludes folders and their contents present in $ExcludeFolders variable in script. Usage: script-name [optional-path] | next-cmd  ... The next-cmd is important for making this script useful. An example: Lists last modified time followed by full path for each folder & file in current directory that was last modifed on 4.05.2024 (4th May) or 5.05.2024 excluding folders whose names are in $ExcludeFolders and such folders' contents script-name | where { ((get-date('5.05.2024'))-$_.LastWriteTime).days -lt 1 } |  ForEach-Object {"$($_.LastWriteTime) $($_.FullName)"}...

Nice short video about docker concepts: 100+ Docker Concepts you Need to Know,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIrNIzy6U_g , 8 min 27 secs by Fireship, published in March 2024.  Nice short video about Kubernetes: Kubernetes Explained in 6 Minutes | k8s Architecture,  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlHvYWVUZyc , 6 min 27 secs by ByteByteGo, published in Jan. 2023.