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Redefining convenience – our new blog platform turns content publishing into a cakewalk

User experience is the hottest topic in website design, but why does that usually apply just to those reading the content? We took the approach a notch further and renewed our blog platform to be exceptionally convenient to use also when it comes to us, platform maintainers and content producers.
Picture of Author Antti Seppälä
Head of Digital Operations

By now, many of you must have noticed the change, but let’s say it for the record: our blog platform has been renewed. While it is visibly different from the old version, the biggest changes have taken place under the hood. Then again, what else would you expect from developers?

I am by no means trying to downplay the significance of appearance when it comes to user experience, but let’s face it: if the engine does not work right, the car won’t run. We wanted to create a platform that would be as developer-friendly as possible, so we focused on functional things that needed to be fixed. Not necessarily because they were broken as such, but because they got in the way of us being able to express our thoughts and ideas in a way that makes sense. That is, without having to worry about getting stuck into all those irritating snags that occurred every once in a while, when we wanted to create, publish, manage or update content on the old platform.

Straight and smooth publication pipeline

The good news is, getting the layout right came quite naturally – once we discovered Hugo. This open-source site generator fulfills our needs extremely well, as the stuff we publish is quite static and static sites are what Hugo is all about. From the visual point of view, Hugo provided a perfectly fitting template engine for creating a look-and-feel that aligns nicely with the Elisa’s design system guidelines, making the blog look familiar and thus helping us keep the corporate watchdogs’ blood pressure under control.

By utilizing Elisa’s own versatile design system and Hugo’s advanced templating engine, we created a theme that looks like Elisa and efficiently utilizes Hugo’s straightforward approach where Markdown content is immediately turned into a site that beats in perfect sync with all other Elisa stuff. No own servers are needed, and all administration work has been efficiently minimized.

Second to none version management

While Hugo makes creating and publishing content work like a charm, GitHub as the chosen version control system lifts the convenience of version management to all new levels. Being widely used also in other parts of Elisa, GitHub takes care of hosting the site’s building blocks extremely smoothly.

We decided to make even a bit more out of GitHub’s opportunities by utilizing GitHub Pages – an advanced yet simple website hosting service that automatically takes files straight from a repository for publishing. This means that for updating the blog, we only need to make a commit repository hosting the markdown files. The Actions feature of GitHub notices this and by generating the content using Hugo, automatically deploys the new version to the site.

The fact that the writer only must push that their commit, and the system takes care of the rest, is, from the developer’s viewpoint, downright beautiful.

Illustration of Blog publishing workflow

Add the other sophisticated features such as headnote shortening and content paging, and it is by no means an understatement to say that our new blog provides us plenty of opportunities to tell captivating stories about ourselves and our work in a more comprehensive and compelling way.

Not to mention the fact that all the hassle and pain related to operating the site has practically vanished. No servers need to be run and practically nothing needs to be known about the machinery that operates in the background. Everything has been made to require as little maintenance as possible.

The new kind of beginning for great stories

Creating the new platform for posting blogs was a rewarding experience. It provided us with an opportunity to try out and test various solutions to see which ones would eventually meet our own needs and make content creation smoother and more straightforward.

As an outcome, we now have a platform that we believe has what it takes to best support our developers without taking their eyes off the ball – that is, the actual development work. With GitHub Actions connecting all the required tools to automate every step of the workflow, the threshold to produce content on a more frequent basis is now significantly lower.

Thanks to minimal maintenance needs, smooth publishing capabilities and convenient update opportunities, our big idea of letting the world know more about our ways of working and about our achievements can now be realized.

Stay tuned.