2 Years of Kilt and Code
By Steven McLintock onIt’s been 2 years since I wrote the first article for this website, and nobody is more surprised than me that I’ve not got bored with it yet. Seriously - there is a shockingly high percentage of blogs that fail after the first few months, and I’m just glad this one hasn’t (yet!).
Being a bit of an introvert, I don’t really enjoy writing these kind of articles, but I do enjoy reading them on other blogs. So, if you’re sitting comfortably, let me tell you a story about a Scottish developer and his personal website.
Origins of “Kilt and Code”
Basically, “kiltandcode” was just an amusing username I came up with for using on social media, before I got tired of infinitely scrolling through Twitter and Reddit. I liked how Macaulay Culkin uses the handle @IncredibleCulk for his Twitter account, so I figured I’m Scottish and I like to code… so what’s better than “kiltandcode”, right?!
I actually created an account on Medium in the beginning, with the simple goal of sharing an article I wrote on Azure Batch with a few workmates and friends on LinkedIn. Medium is great if you just want to publish something quickly, but for numerous reasons (see Why I Don’t Write On Medium by Florimond Manca) I decided to create my own personal website instead.
So here I am! For 2 years now I’ve been using the domain name mclintock.dev, the static site generator Jekyll and the hosting platform GitHub Pages to run this website.
Ye Olde Kilt and Code
If you’ve ever used the website The Wayback Machine to see what websites used to look like in the past, you might get a kick out of this. I thought I’d keep a few screenshots of what this website used to look like in case I ever decided to write an article like this. So for your enjoyment, here’s the good, the bad and the ugly:
Hello? Is There Anybody Out There?
I mostly write for my future self, so I can re-learn something I’ve probably forgotten, like the idea of Outsourcing Our Memories. With that said, it’s nice to see if anyone is actually out there, visiting and reading this website. It’s also useful to know if an article does as well as I expect.
Fortunately, Google Analytics is free and easy to use, and even better, the traffic it’s reporting is increasing over time. It was definitely quiet around here in the beginning… very quiet, but now the website is fast approaching 10,000 visits per month. A number that I hope to be small in comparison in a few years, we’ll see!
Greatest Hits
I’m actually really proud of all the articles on this website so far, even the less popular ones, but the articles that seem to be generating the most traffic are:
- Show Validation Error Messages for Reactive Forms in Angular 9
- Puppeteer Sharp: Crawl the Web using C# and Headless Chrome
- Best Practices for Writing Unit Tests in C# for Bulletproof Code
- How to Create a Blog Using Jekyll and GitHub Pages on Windows
- My Journey to Becoming a Full Stack Developer
The Future
As well as the backlog of articles I still need to write, there’s still quite a few changes I’d like to make to this website. I’d like to have a newsletter to increase the readership, and now that I have quite a few articles there’s definitely a few improvements to be made in the ‘All Articles’ page - such as tags, search and ‘Related Articles’.
Anyway, those are all for another day. For today I would just like to say thank you for reading! If you’d like to get in touch, feel free to email me.