Erasing personal data from hard drives or solid-state drives

Over the years I have ended up with roughly a half dozen computers in various stages of decay. Two water-damaged Macbooks. An old HP laptop my dad handed down to me to “make faster and find a home for”. A gaming desktop from college that was caked in dust and shorted when powered up ten years later. One task I had to perform for all these machines was to collect and remove any personal data from internal storage (hard drives/solid-state drives)....

April 12, 2021 · 4 min · Shariq Jamil

Smarter image optimization

This blog has been a nice source of motivation to continue improving my code and development processes. In my previous post, I discussed the process of writing a Bash script to resize and optimize images for publishing to our family’s recipe blog. I mentioned that one improvement I could make is to automate the process of identifying which files needed to be resized. The original script I place large images into the “optimize” directory which are then backed up and processed when I run the following script....

March 31, 2021 · 3 min · Shariq Jamil

Optimizing Images for the Web

When we first started adding photos of food to JamilGhar, we did not think about image size. The average image we posted to the blog was between 2 and 8 megabytes and the resolution was over 3000 x 3000 pixels. The image below is an example. For most blogs, images should be less than 1000 pixels in the longest direction and preferably less than 100 kB. Featured or “hero” images can be up to 500 kB if used sparingly....

March 29, 2021 · 4 min · Shariq Jamil

Creating blog posts in Hugo

Adding or updating posts in Hugo is easy. After all, content management is one of the framework’s primary features. My wife has little interest in understanding the software development side of blogging. Even she finds it effortless to add blog posts in markdown and half-a-dozen images per post through GitHub. Directory structure In Hugo, posts go into the content folder which will be in the root directory of your site. Some theme’s may have varying patterns....

March 22, 2021 · 2 min · Shariq Jamil

Adding a theme in Hugo

Create a Hugo site After installing Hugo, I was ready to start on the blog. I have a directory (or “folder” for Windows folks) on my laptop for software development projects. Most of these projects are also hosted in my GitHub account. I navigated to that directory and created a folder called food-blog. Inside food-blog, I ran Hugo’s command to start a new site. hugo new site food-blog In the screenshot below, you can see that the new Hugo site was created successfully....

March 21, 2021 · 3 min · Shariq Jamil