How to Setup a Hugo Website on GitHub

I recently transitioned my blog over to GitHub Pages from WordPress. I was using the free version from WordPress.org and I wanted more granular control over the layout. Additionally, I wanted to automate my blog publishing and social media notifications; the free version of WordPress didn’t meet my needs. So I looked around and eventually fell in love with Hugo! This post outlines how to go about setting up a GitHub Pages website/blog using Hugo.

Using Amazon Sqs With Powershell

Amazon SQS is a flexible queue service that has many uses cases, from scalable web applications and processing systems to inter-application communications. This is useful if you need to process lots of data at once or have threads or workers to do a specific action to a large pool of data.

With the explosion of use cases for PowerShell and Docker in production systems, you can easily scale using queue systems like Amazon SQS. SQS is beneficial when your service or application has job workers that need to perform actions based on a large pool of data.

Traverse Local Certificate Store With Powershell

Windows Certificate Store is typically accessed using the MMC Snap-In, You can view both the Computer or User certificate stores using a traditional MMC console. Sometimes though, you may just want to programmatically access it using PowerShell. Luckily you can do this using a PSDrive that is created on your machine.

As you can see there is a Cert drive and you can access it using PowerShell’s multiple location based Cmdlets. For example, if you can use cd Cert:\ and it will change your current directory to the certificate PSDrive. You can also use Set-Location,Push-Location, Pop-Location etc. when access your PSDrives.

Powershell Console, Scripts, Functions, Modules, Cmdlets, Oh My!

PowerShell is unique, but it is also necessary in today’s world. I find that newcomers to the language are sometimes confused or don’t understand the basic layers of PowerShell scripting. You can use PowerShell in different ways, but I have yet to find an all encompassing article that explains the high-level of how to interact with PowerShell in these different ways.

This post will explain the different concepts (or layers) of PowerShell code organization and their main advantages and use cases. We will dive into the different approaches of implementing PowerShell and why you would use one over the other.

Using Github to Revive Blog Posts

I am currently migrating my blog content from Wordpress.com to GitHub pages using Hugo. During this transition, I wanted to have the ability to “revive” my blog posts on a scheduled basis on social media (e.g. Twitter). With Wordpress, you can use the WordPress Revive Old Posts plugin but with WordPress.com you have to have a premium business account to use plugins.

If you’re in a similar situation of if you want a free way to automate the “re-posting” of your blog content then you’re in luck! Below I have listed some initial requirements that are needed to use this process.

Connect Your Bot to Slack

In my previous two posts we created a knowledge base of questions and answers using QnAMaker and we created our Web App Bot in the Azure Portal. Now that we have a bot created and it is responding as we intended, we can interact with our bot directly through our web browser (or embed it into a website) or we can integrate into our Slack workspace.

Please make sure you have a Slack workspace created and you have access to create a Slack application. Login to your Slack workspace API and select Create New App in the top right-hand corner. You will need to give your new application a name and select the appropriate workspace to create your new application.

Create a Web App Bot Using Azure Bot Services

In my last post, we create a QnA Maker knowledge base that our Azure Web App Bot will use as it’s repository of questions & answers. Now, we are going to create our bot using Azure’s Bot Services.

First thing is that we should go ahead and log into the Azure Portal. In the top left-hand corner click the Create a resource button. You will then need to Search the marketplace in the New blade for Web App Bot.