I’m finally diving in the deep end… It’s been a little while coming, but I’m finally kicking off the IT Pro in EDU blog.
philmargetts.com started life as a simple landing page sitting on Git Hub pages almost 12 months ago (she still lives – for now – at philmargetts.github.io). I just wanted a simple online landing page I could reference with links to my email, Twitter, IT forums etc. I had the hope that one day I’d get around to standing up a more flexible site with a CMS behind it, and here we are!
The “why”
As an IT pro in the K-12 education sector, its my business to implement technology solutions that benefit and enable the teaching and learning taking place. There’s a wealth of information online concerning tech in education – from a teacher’s perspective. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course! However, I’ve found that as an IT pro in the trenches, following guys like Sam McNeill (samuelmcneill.com) and participating in forums such as MITIE (Managing IT in Education, mitie.edu.au) has been extremely helpful to both me and my school. My aim with this blog is to further participate in the tech in edu discussion, from the perspective of an IT pro (while having some fun in the process!).
The “what”
I forsee this blog covering tech news relevant to education, projects, how-to’s, random thoughts, along with a healthy dose of Office 365. But who knows? We’ll just see what happens…
The “how”
Yep, I’ve jumped on the WordPress bandwagon :). I’ve done some work with it before and appreciate the flexibility, although if there are any suggestions definitely let me know. I’m starting out with it hosted on a minimal droplet from Digital Ocean with traffic passed through CloudFlare for their CDN and SSL; DDoS protection and analytics are also a plus. I’m a big fan of the simple, “one-click app” setup from Digital Ocean while still having access to the Ubuntu 16.04 server for full control. What techie doesn’t like to tinker? Currently using the CloudFlare Flexible SSL plugin to prevent the infinite redirect loops that come when loading a WP site with the CloudFlare flexible SSL option.
