Blyth's Blog: A Technical Architect's Musings

Explore why C# developers should embrace Node.js especially with Optimizely's SaaS CMS on the horizon. Understand the shift towards agile web development and how mastering Node.js can open up new opportunities in the evolving digital landscape.

Explore the step-by-step guide to setting up Optimizely with dotnet aspire and C# 8.0, tailored for developers seeking to enhance their digital projects. Dive into my comprehensive walkthrough on the Optimizely Aspire GitHub repository.

Discussing the benefits of local load testing, and how k6 can also be used for regression/integration testing

Now that Optimizely 12 runs on .NET 5 it can be run on a Mac, and with most front enders using Macs, I thought it might be useful to demonstrate the steps on how to get it up and running on a Mac.

Finally default values have been added as an option in Content Models in the Contentful CMS

Also built on Contentful and Azure Cognitive Search

Contentful doesn't have an option to choose a target for links in a rich text field (yet), so for now I assume that external links should be opened in a new tab. This is achieved with an IContentRenderer.

After sitting the exam, I thought I would document some of the ways I prepared for the exam, and what I found most useful out of the material.

This week I successfully passed my Optimizely (formerly Episerver) Content Cloud certifcation.

Contentful does have some basic search functionality, but it is quite limited and quite difficult to implement (at least in .net). So leveraging Contentful webhooks I decided to index the data into Azure Cognitive Search service.

Contentful have recently introduced tagging, I think this is a really important step forward for the headless CMS.

Can emoji's be used in URLs, page titles and meta data? 🤔😂😂

My approach to dynamic CMS content using Mediatr (and Automapper)

A simple episerver project with a couple of basic page types to show how an Initializable Module can be used to generate pages that QA and UAT teams can use during their testing/sign off process. I have used Bogus and Waffle to generate realistic...

A categorised list of nuget packages that I tend to use in most projects. Covers data access, business logic, and presentation packages.

After primarily working with SDL Tridion for the past 5 years (along with Contentful) and prior to that Umbraco. I have recently started working with Episerver, and I wanted to give my initial thoughts on it. After starting the training/certification I...

There are two basic types of programming languages, object-oriented and functional, what happens with these worlds collide?

A nice script I put together to do load testing based on the contents of a sitemap.

My solution to the writing SDL Web Topology Powershell scripts