New Wyam-based .NET Oxford website

I recently wrote a blog post saying that I've decided to stop all the in-depth write-ups for each and every .NET Oxford meetup that we have. This was mainly due to the time it took to write them, and I now want to be able to spend that time writing content of my own choosing, rather than being restricted by our speakers' topics.

To replace the write-ups, which also acted as our meetup notes - I've now created a dedicated website, https://www.dotnetoxford.com. The idea being that we'll have a post per meetup, which will include photos and any relevant links from the event. It also has tags which allow users to easily drill down on what topics we've covered since we started the user-group.

I've gone through adding a post for every past meetup we've had. However, for meetups before I stopped writing the write-up blog posts - I've just put a link to those write-ups, rather than repeating the details.

This also also allows me to follow an identical format for the new Azure Oxford meetup I'm starting soon (blog post about this coming shortly!).

If you spot any mistakes on the website, please feel free to let me know, or even create a PR! :)

Implementation Details

I've been meaning to try out the .NET-based Wyam static content generator for a while, and thought this would be a perfect use-case. Especially as it has blog recipes, which are perfect for what I was looking for. The meetup notes for each meetup are blog-post entries with the publish date matching the date of the meetup. I can write the posts in Markdown, and tags are supported out of the box.

Using a static content generator means that the published website is just pure HTML/CSS/JS. There's no database required, and it's also fast and secure (no database to hack!).

I had already registered the domain name when we first setup .NET Oxford, and I already had an AKS cluster with this blog and my Everstack website running in it. So hosting was sorted. I set-up Azure Pipelines (the CI/CD part of Azure Devops) to automatically build and deploy it when I pushed a change to the Git repo.

I hope this proves useful - any feedback is greatly appreciated!