Welcome to Explainly!

Our new marketing and branding page is under development. You'll be seeing some changes around here pretty soon! You can ignore the boilerplate ghost content for now as our content development team and admins get a good look about the place and get a feel for how to work this newfangled publishing platform. We don't really believe in keeping everything under the covers until we're ready for the big reveal - we believe in transparency! Our work is reflective of our ever-evolving process and creative thinking. As we take on and learn new technology so we can become the experts, we distill that process down into the clear, succinct explanations we know you'll come to expect and love.

For instance, this front-end presence is actually a culmination of a wide variety of technologies and partners. We're utilizing Cloudflare's DNS & SSL in front of Microsoft's Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with Traefik and Consul, running on 2 managed VMs with an Azure Load Balancer in front of it, and deploying via Azure DevOps build and release pipelines. We're using a slightly customized Docker image with the unofficial community ghost container as its basis, and we've got our image stored in our own Azure Container Registry. All of that horsepower lets us easily build out this branding site and blog, with an easy to use native app from Ghost to update the design, author the articles and publish content. In addition, we're using a persistent volume claim to store our blog's content, so that regardless of new deploys or container restarts, we'll be presenting the same data. We're also using  Mailgun for e-mail integration with Ghost. And that's only the current technology, not including the various tech we utilized to develop our final process. We built it with the command line, Azure CLI, kubectl and using Visual Studio Code. Combined of course with our source control system, Azure DevOps Git repositories. We'll be sure to do a full write-up of this process so that others can follow, because even though it might feel like overkill for a simple blog, it's just one container in our fully production-ready system, with easy horizontal scale-out, and vertical scale-up capabilities.

But enough about the technology. Let's talk vision, let's talk timeline, and let's talk next steps. We want to present something to the world that's going to be a reflection of our philosophy on things like design, process, and execution. We want to flesh this out quickly, over the next 2-3 days, and polish it up over the next 2-3 weeks. To start with, we'll be selecting a theme over the next few days, as well as transitioning our legacy blog content over, and determining topics to kick off the new launch. Then, as those articles will be rolling out hot off the presses, we'll be playing with layout and typography, selecting appropriate marketing copy and company branding to reflect our "new duds." And that'll sum up the initial timeline, after which we'll publish out our next plan of attack with those next steps, on and on, ad infinitum - or until we go broke. Famous last words? We'll see! :)