Social Media Posts after Migrating from WordPress to Hugo Static Pages

I posted recently on my experience moving to Hugo from WordPress. One feature lost in the move were the Wordpress plugins used to automatically post to Twitter and LinkedIn when a new blog post was created. I always found this very useful, so looked or a way to replicate this functionality for static pages. The solution I ended up with was Azure Logic Apps. I created a Logic App with a scheduled triggered that checked my blogs’s RSS feed every 30 minutes. If it found the RSS feed had been updated, I then created a bitly link for the new post’s URL, then posts to Email (as a test), Twitter and LinkedIn. ...

July 7, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Migrating from WordPress to Hugo Static Pages

Background Over the years, the Black Marble blog server has been hosted on many platforms. It’s previous incarnation was WordPress, running as a network of sites with an aggregated feed. Of late we had found this slow to serve the first page (due to website start-up time) and there was the constant need to keep the instance patched. The time had come for a new solutions, and we picked Hugo Static Pages. ...

July 1, 2022 · 3 min · Richard Fennell

Don't skimp on resources for GHES for demo instances

I wanted to have a look at some GitHub Enterprise Server (GHES) upgrade scenarios so decided to create a quick GHES install on my local test Hyper-V instance. Due to me skimping on resources, and making a typo, creating this instance was much harder than it should have been. The first issue was I gave it a tiny data disk, this was down to me making a typo in my GB to Bytes conversion when specifying the size. Interestingly, the GHES setup does not initially complain but sits on the ‘reloading system services’ stage until it times out. If you check the /setup/config.log you see many Nomad related 500 errors. A reboot of the VM showed the real problem, the log then showed plenty of out-of-disk space messages. ...

June 16, 2022 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for can't add second outlook.com account to Outlook Desktop - requires non-existent PIN

I was recently trying to set up a copy of the Outlook desktop app with two outlook.com email accounts and hit a strange issue. I was able to add the first one without any problems, but when I tried to add the second one I got an error message asking for PIN, and most importantly on the same dialog showing the second outlook.com email address. This is confusing as I know of no way to set a PIN on an outlook.com account. ...

June 10, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Adding Job Summary support to my GitHub Release Notes Action

A recent addition to GitHub Actions is the ability to create a custom job summary. Using a simple echo command in a script you can write to the job summary steps: - name: Adding markdown run: echo '### Hello world! :rocket:' >> $GITHUB\_STEP\_SUMMARY Now, this got me thinking. I have a well-used custom release notes extension for Azure DevOps. It has a GitHub Action equivalent, but it does not seem to get as much usage. Would adding support for custom Job Summaries make it more useful? ...

May 19, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Fix for cannot 'TypeError: Cannot read property' when Dependabot submits a PR to upgrade a Jest Module

GitHub’s Dependabot is a great tool to help keep your dependencies up to date, and most of the time the PR it generates just merges without a problem. However, sometimes there are issues with other related dependencies. This was the case with a recent PR to update jest-circus to 28.x. The PR failed with the error TypeError: Cannot read property ’enableGlobally’ of undefined at jestAdapter (node_modules/jest-circus/build/legacy-code-todo-rewrite/jestAdapter.js:39:25) at TestScheduler.scheduleTests (node_modules/@jest/core/build/TestScheduler.js:333:13) at runJest (node_modules/@jest/core/build/runJest.js:404:19) at _run10000 (node_modules/@jest/core/build/cli/index.js:320:7) at runCLI (node_modules/@jest/core/build/cli/index.js:173:3) ...

May 19, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

On-Demand video available for May's 'Microsoft and GitHub DevOps Forum: DevSecOps'

Did you miss the ‘Microsoft and GitHub DevOps Forum: DevSecOps’ event I presented at earlier in May? Well worry not, the on-demand stream is now available - here

May 17, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

More examples of using custom variables in Azure DevOps multi-stage YML

I have blogged in the past ( here , here and here) about the complexities and possible areas of confusion with different types of Azure DevOps pipeline variables. Well here is another example of how to use variables and what can trip you up. The key in this example is the scope of a variable, whether it is available outside a job and the syntax to access it Variables local to the Job So, if you create your variable as shown below ...

May 5, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell

Updating the Azure Application client_secret used by Packer

As I have posted about previously, we create our Azure DevOps build agent images using the same Packer definitions as used by Microsoft. This time when I ran my Packer command to build an updated VHD I got the error Build ‘vhd’ errored after 135 milliseconds 708 microseconds: adal: Refresh request failed. Status Code = ‘401’. Response body: {“error”:“invalid_client”,“error_description”:“AADSTS7000222: The provided client secret keys for app ‘6425416f-aa94-4c20-8395-XXXXXXX’ are expired. Visit the Azure portal to create new keys for your app: https://aka.ms/NewClientSecret, or consider using certificate credentials for added security: https://aka.ms/certCreds.rnTrace ID: 65a200cf-8423-4d52-af07-67bf26225200rnCorrelation ID: 0f86de87-33fa-443b-8186-4de3894972e1rnTimestamp: 2022-05-03 08:36:50Z”,“error_codes”:[7000222],“timestamp”:“2022-05-03 08:36:50Z”,“trace_id”:“65a200cf-8423-4d52-af07-67bf26225200”,“correlation_id”:“0f86de87-33fa-443b-8186-4de3894972e1”,“error_uri”:“https://login.microsoftonline.com/error?code=7000222"} Endpoint https://login.microsoftonline.com/545a7a95-3c4d-4e88-9890-baa86d5fdacb/oauth2/token==> Builds finished but no artifacts were created. ...

May 3, 2022 · 2 min · Richard Fennell

Speaking at the rescheduled Microsoft and GitHub DevOps Forum on the 4th of May

I’m speaking at the resheduled Microsoft and GitHub DevOps Forum on the 4th of March. To Register: https://mktoevents.com/Microsoft+Event/333304/157-GQE-382?wt.mc_id=AID3045587_QSG_EML_586670

April 7, 2022 · 1 min · Richard Fennell