dapiced.github.io

Personal site and blog of Dominic D'Apice - Developer, Azure Infrastructure AI.

Live at dominicdapice.com - custom domain (CNAME, DNS on Cloudflare), built with Jekyll on GitHub Pages, deep-space theme matching the GitHub profile.

Writing a new blog post

Add a Markdown file to _posts/ named YYYY-MM-DD-slug.md:

---
layout: post
title: "My post title"
date: 2026-07-15 09:00:00 -0400
tags: [azure, ansible]
description: "Search snippet, 120-160 characters - shown in Google results and social shares."
image: /assets/img/my-cover.jpg
---

Post content in Markdown…

![Descriptive alt text](/assets/img/my-photo.webp){: width="1600" height="1200" loading="lazy" }

• description and image are optional but recommended: image becomes the og:image social preview (JPG/PNG, ideally 1200x630 - falls back to /assets/img/og-default.jpg).
• Photos: resize to ~1600 px max and convert to WebP before committing; always set width/height + loading="lazy" (the first image of a post can stay eager).

Push to main - GitHub Pages rebuilds and publishes automatically in about a minute.

Structure

• index.html - homepage (hero, about, projects, skills, timeline, blog preview). Project cards are static HTML (indexable without JS) refreshed live from the GitHub API.
• blog/index.html - post listing
• 404.html - custom not-found page
• _posts/ - blog posts (Markdown)
• _layouts/ - page shells (default.html with Person JSON-LD, post.html with giscus comments + mermaid)
• assets/ - CSS, JS (starfield, typed roles, projects fetch), favicon, images, videos
• _config.yml - Jekyll config: canonical url, SEO/feed/sitemap plugins, default og:image, social links

SEO setup

• Canonical domain comes from url: in _config.yml - jekyll-seo-tag generates the canonical/og/twitter tags from it on every page.
• sitemap.xml is not in the repo on purpose: jekyll-sitemap generates it at build time with every page and post (live here). Same for feed.xml (jekyll-feed).
• robots.txt - minimal allow-all + sitemap pointer. Never add Disallow: /assets/ (it would hide CSS/JS/images from Google's renderer).
• BingSiteAuth.xml + 3678…d.txt - Bing site verification and IndexNow key for instant URL submission to Bing.
• Google verification is a meta tag in _layouts/default.html.