Welcome

This first guide is a guide on how to use guides! So meta.

I recently made a lot of changes about where my guides will live moving forward. My goal was to use something that provided me enough control to where I could make things how I want them (easy to read, no ads, etc..) but also low enough maintenance that I was not spending lots of time keeping it running.

The Old

I started with just putting my guides in the YouTube descriptions of my videos. Pretty quickly I realized that was not going to work. I then moved to Substack which was cool because of how simple it was. It offered a totally hands off way to just get content out there and focus on the videos and projects I was working on. That has worked well for nearly a year. And to be honest, I have been pretty happy with Substack. It offers a lot of nice features, but I just felt that when following my own guides it was not as concise and readable as I wanted. I never did figure out if there was a built-in dark mode that I could toggle.

The New

So in typical fashion, I decided to move to something new right when things are super busy. Luckily, I was able to find Docusaurus, which is an open-source project developed by Facebook. However you feel about them, some decent things have come out of that company. Docusaurus is like if React (another Facebook thing) and Markdown had a baby. In fact, one of the supported file types is .mdx which is a Markdown file that allows for React components. Cool stuff.

So this is the solution. A Docusaurus wiki/guide site that is hosted on AWS Amplify. It does cost a bit of money (few $ per month) but I can control a lot more of the look and feel. I lose out on a few features, like being able to have comments and the ability to send email notifications for new articles. But I think promoting my Discord and having YouTube videos will make up for a bit of that.

The Plan

The plan is to have two main sections of the site: Wiki and Guides.

The Guides section will be very similar to what I have been doing. Basically a tutorial on how to get something done. It will be verbose and lots of explaining and context as needed. These will be statically written (except for fixing errors and stuff). The main idea being that I write a guide on how to do something at that moment in time. There will almost always be a YouTube video that goes along with a guide.

The Wiki section will be extremely concise step-by-step instructions on how to complete a task. The goal here is to make these modular so they can be referenced by other wikis and guides. For instance, I might have a wiki on how to install Portainer. But that has some prerequisites such as having Docker installed. So I can reference the wiki that covers how to install Docker and not re-write those instructions in the Portainer wiki. I might then guide for Portainer, and I would reference the wikis for Docker and Portainer in it. The guides give me a chance to not only create a video that dives a bit deeper than just the wiki, but it could cover a few things, such as installing Docker + Portainer, and then go into a bit about how to navigate around Portainer.

In 6 months the guide might be slightly outdated, but I would continue to keep the wikis.

The best part in all of this is no one really needs to understand how this works. In fact, I am mostly writing this because I want to get my thoughts down and really think through what my plan is. Ultimately, it should be very similar to how it was done previously.

So that is it! I am going to end this here. The site still has a lot of changes to go through but I am excited to see where this goes. Please consider joining the Discord and subscribing to my YouTube. Thanks!