This Blog Gets another Facelift

It has been 7 years since I started blogging here. As the technology progresses, I have changed the theme and the blog title few times to make sure it is still relevant and reflecting what my main focus are. The last time I updated the look-and-feel of this blog was back n July 2014 – almost 3 years ago.

Over the last year or so, I am not particularly happy with how my blog looks. By having the phrase ‘System Center’ as part of the blog title, it makes me feel being antique, not to mention like many other folks in this industry, I have been shifting my focus away from System Center and spending more and more time on Azure related technologies.

I also had some very lengthy outages with my previous hoster, which caused my site went offline for 3 days and lost couple of weeks of data. I moved my site to another hoster based in USA, but ever since the outage, I noticed the average daily visit count dropped a bit. I wasn’t sure what the problem was, but it is slowly climbing back up. However, during the the last few months, I have found (or been told by friends) several issues related to the site move.

Today, I have spent some time updating my blog, I have made the following changes:

1. The blog title has been changed to “Managing Cloud and Datacenter by Tao Yang”.
2. As you can see, a new simplistic theme! I hated the one I created 3 years ago, it looks especially bad when I browse it on a large high res monitor (i.e. my main monitor, which is a 28-inch 4K monitor).
3. I changed my RSS feed to display only a summary of the posts as opposed to the entire post. This is to help driving more traffic to my site, which helps me to collect the real site stats. I need this to be accurate. It helps me during my MVP renewal every year, as well as helping my blog sponsors to get more publicity.
4. I have added a SSL certificate to the blog and it is now enforcing HTTPS. If you have bookmarked my blog, the link should still work. HTTP requests are automatically redirected to HTTPS. I have been told some search engines returns my blog URL with HTTPS, which caused certificate error because the certificate loaded on the site was created by my hoster for the hosting server, which does not match my blog URL.

I hope you enjoy the new look of my blog, and please do let me know if you have any issues.