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  • 13 min read

Blog Relaunched

My blog has existed since 2011. The intent has always been to share knowledge I gained, whether this be for someone else, or just for my future self. From the beginning I used Wordpress which makes it quite easy to set up a blog. There are also tons of themes and plugins that you can install and use.

Writing (especially in public) is not super natural for me. Doing it in WordPress did not feel natural to me either. So for a while I was dredding to create new blog posts because it was too cumbersome for me multiple reasons.

Another difficulty was keeping WordPress up to date along with the plugins and any customizations to it. While it is fairly easy to customize CSS, JS, or the PHP code of themes and plugins, there is no easy way to keep those separate so that themes and plugins can be easily updated.

I switched to a containerized setup, putting as much as possible in a repository. This included customizations. My idea was that it would be easier to update themes and plugins and re-apply those customizations. In the end, it was still too much manual work, however. It's not as easy as merging a dependency update on your repository raised by Renovate (of which I am a huge fan) and automatically re-deploying.

A few years ago, I came across the amazing Material for MkDocs. It is a technical documentation theme for MkDocs with many great features. Documentation is written in Markdown and can be version controlled in a repository. This is basically "documentation as code".

I first introduced it at work a few years ago for various documentation sites. Together with Material for MkDocs this has been fantastic.

Since Material for MkDocs has a blog plugin I've been wanting to switch to this for a while. I knew that this will allow me to write blog posts more naturally (in a text editor) and treat everything as code. I finally got around to it and migrated my old WordPress site to what is now a static site.

It is live now 😄.

Keep reading if you are interested in the details of how it is set up.

COVID-19 Montréal Dashboard

Thanks in particular to the great German podcast Das Coronavirus-Update from NDR with two fantastic virologists (Christian Drosten and Sandra Ciesek) I gained a better understanding of the pandemic and this coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) and learned quite a lot new stuff. Maybe because of this, I felt for a while that there was a lack here (in Québec/Montréal) about how the data is presented/visualized. But I had this realization "late" (Fall 2020) and didn't have past data so I didn't want to start something from scratch.

One day I randomly came across a repository on GitHub of a dashboard for Montreal. Unfortunately, the website hadn't been updated in a while so I reached out to Jeremy Moreau who created it. We had a chat and I started helping him adding the data, adjusting to new data formats and automating the data retrieval and processing. Adding the missing data from the past was possible thanks to the Wayback Machine and (for the most part) to the hard work by Jean-Paul Soucy archiving all Canada-wide data for the COVID-19 Canada Open Data Working Group.

SEPAQ Availability Scraper

Recently, we were trying to find an available camp site on SEPAQ during the summer. We were late to the party, though, and most (interesting) sites were already booked or had single days left here and there.

Finding the remaining sites at flexible dates is actually quite cumbersome since you need to go to each camp site (and click through a calendar week by week there) or go to a single spot of a camp site to see its availability calendar. This is especially cumbersome if you are flexible in terms of the dates and the park.

Long story short, I looked at how to get the availability of the camp sites and hacked together a scraper. It recursively finds all camping spots and downloads the availability for each of them. Once they are downloaded it can parse them and filter for available spots (with minimum days and a desired date range).

You can find the code here: https://github.com/mschoettle/sepaq-availability-scraper

There's definitely some things that could be improved but it got the job done.