Some while ago, I realized that the entire Foreman website was written in Markdown and stored in GitHub, where any contributor can help to improve it - but not the blog! An area almost entirely composed of text; an area where guest posts would be hugely valuable; an area where fixes to old popular posts would be fantasic; all written on Blogger, where we can’t easily get contribution from the community. Sigh.
Well, no longer! Today we’re unveiling the new Foreman Blog!
What’s new?
In terms of content - very little. The old posts have been imported from Blogger via their XML export tool, and then converted to Markdown via the awesome Pandoc tool. Images were downloaded from blogger too, and Gists loaded via the jekyll-gist gem which was already part of the website stack. However, the vast majority of the text is unchanged.
The URL has changed though - it’s now http://theforeman.org/blog
What’s changed?
We’ve tried pretty hard to be consistent. Obviously the style of the pages now comes under the general styling of the overall Foreman website, so that’s a plus. Later this week we’ll redirect blog.theforeman.org to theforeman.org so that the permalinks stored in search engines will continue to work.
There is an RSS feed, of course. You can get it at /feed.xml and there’s an RSS icon at the top of the blog index. Please do update your RSS readers if you’re using the old Blogger feed.
Post comments appear to be present and correct, so there should be no changes or continuity loss from Blogger.
Great! How can I help?
As part of my role as the new Community Lead, I’ll definitely be posting more about all sorts of Foreman related things, as well as my own activities to keep the community informed. In addition, the main goal for changing to Markdown was to enable community contribution, so …
If you see any bugs or problems with any old blog posts, please do let us know in the issue tracker or even better, open a Pull Request to fix the problem (see Contributing for a guide on that). You can find the raw text of the posts here.
If you want to rework an old blog post for a newer version of Foreman, please feel free to do so - many of the older blog posts (such as the one on EC2 provisioning) are very popular, but were written for much older versions of Foreman. The community will no doubt make good use of updated versions. PRs are very much welcome.
I’d also like to encourage guest authorship on the blog. If you have a blog post of your own that you’d like to reshare on the Foreman blog as part of this, please do open a PR (or send me the text of the blog if you’re not into Git).
Above all enjoy the new blog, and let us know about what you like/don’t like in the comments below!