About this site, and Kieron

Hi, thanks for paying some attention to my corner of the internet.

So I’m Kieron, a Scotsman based near Minneapolis Minnesota since 2005. I’m a digital marketer by trade with a wide range of experience in the past two decades.

Particular areas of focus have been: paid search, digital analytics, tag management, marketing automation, email campaigns, digital body language, and site building.

In my spare time I spend way too much time online, usually learning and practicing with new technology tools. I’m currently working through the datacamp.com data analyst path and learning Python as I go. I have a working Mautic marketing automation install (though nothing really planned for it) and in summer 2021 I’ve been learning about Git, something that always seemed useful but I missed along the way until now.

This site is built in Hugo. I’ve been interested in how websites are built since I created my first site back in 1997 at a really long home page URL somewhere deep in a Stirling University server. The entire thing was hand coded in notepad.exe and if I recall, there was a lot of <blink>blink text.</blink>

More recently I’ve been building sites in Drupal & Backdrop, and of course in Wordpress when I have to.

The core web vitals panic of 2021 sent me down a rabit hole around increasing site speed, and that lead me to Hugo. Hugo is a static site generator, one of a few options for this kind of site, but from what I can tell it’s the fastest one around. It’s been fun learning about it, and this current site is most of the results.

Additionally, having a site allows me to experiment with different analytics & tagging solutions. Currently I’m just using free Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, and could probably go forever without exhausing the possibilities of both. In the future I’d like to experiment with some different open source analytics options.

When I’m not nerding out on technology, you can usually find me reading while enjoying some of the amazing craft beer options available in Minnesota, or with a whisky in hand. Otherwise you might see me on the bike paths on the Twin Cities west side, or purifying myself in the waters of Lake Minnetonka.

Thanks for stopping by

Kieron