XM Cloud website, in 5 minutes, or less

I’m old enough to remember when WordPress first shook-up the website publishing game, coming out with its famous ‘5-minute install’. Prior to that, even the most straightforward self-hosted website involved many steps, tools and processes, well beyond the ability of most non-technical users. Nowadays, there are plenty of basic ‘1 click’ hosted offerings, but still not many other legitimate enterprise-level site management and publishing tools that allow you to build and publish a new non-technical, author-friendly, website within 5 minutes, or less.

Enter XM Cloud…

Let me walk you through the key steps to have a brand-new, fully-functioning website in minutes. Start from Sitecore’s Cloud portal, and go to XM Cloud.

From XM Cloud app, click the big purple button to ‘Create website’

Let’s go ahead and choose the Skate Park basic site template.

You should get a message that says the building process may take up 2 minutes.

2 minutes later, your site is ready for WYSIWYG editing in Pages, Sitecore’s new easy drag-and-drop authoring platform.

Before you can share your new (default ‘Skate Park’) website with the world, you will need to setup hosting. For this, go to the Sitecore XM Cloud Deploy app, find your new site, select the 3 dots and select ‘Set up hosting’.

The easiest (quickest) way to get your site hosted is to setup a Vercel installation. Once you have done this once for the environment, including the XM Cloud / Github integration, you are good to go for future sites.

Because we have an existing Vercel installation, we just need to ‘Create and link’.

From the Deploy app, you should now be able to see a Hosting URL against your site. Hit ‘Publish all sites’, let the process run and try the URL.

And with just those few steps, in under 5 minutes, you should have a brand new demo ‘Skate Park’ XM Cloud website, just like me, built and published and ready for visitors.

Whitbourn Christmas 2013

we had a very busy Christmas – which was made even busier with us packing and leaving to go to PY Summer Camp first thing on Boxing Day morning.

Christmas Eve we went with Paps and Kath to dinner at Dragon Castle, which was the girls first time in a Chinese restaurant. They loved trying to eat with the chopsticks and loved the Dim Sims the best!

On Christmas morning we woke up and opened our presents – the girls each received a suitcase which was pretty cool. We then went off to Church and then went over to the Cousins house for lunch. There was about 19 people for lunch.

After that we came home for a rest and then went out to the weir for Dinner at Naa and Poppas house.



After that we had the best week at Summer Camp learning about how Jesus is supreme over everything. It was a wonderful week.



Birthdays!

We had some more birthdays – Tally and Cade. The good thing is that they are only 2 weeks apart so we left the decorations up for both of them to enjoy…

Tally had her 6th birthday which meant she was on a party year. We had 5 of her friends over for a party – they had a great time.
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Cade went for his annual “run the amount of kms of the age that you turn”. We got him a fire – which we have all enjoyed!!!

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Mothers Day 2011

I was excited about Mothers Day – but Maisie was even more excited! She made me a necklace at pre school and could hardly contain her excitement as the day drew near!

Here are me and the girls having a very rushed present giving moment before running off to church.

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Our Day at Blowering

In January when the Stevens/Shanahan family had their annual pilgrimage to Blowering, I decided that we would take a day trip up to visit Naa and Poppa at camping! So, Aunty Jacq, the girls and I left Albs at about 7am to get up there for morning tea. As soon as we arrived the girls wanted to go swimming, so we had a quick bite to eat and then went down to the water for the rest of the morning. We stayed until after lunch and then traveled home so the girls could nap in the car. It was a great day – everyone had fun and didnt want to leave “camping”.

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Pippa kicking back relaxing
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Alice being a mermaid
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Pippa having a nap
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Tally and Aunty Jacq going on the biscuit
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Maisie having a drive of the boat
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Maisie and Lisa on the biscuit
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Phil, Fleur and Shawn doing cool tricks
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Alice, Aunty Jacq, Tally, Naa, Aunty Fleur and Maisie having a swim
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Finishing off the day with a dance routine for Naa and Poppa

Nailed the Nail Can Hill

John, Cade, Stuart, Lincoln & Hannah all raced in the Nail Can Hill run last weekend.

This is the before photo as they got ready to head off to the start at 9am.
Nailing the Nail Can Hill

The race is 11.3 kms up and over Nail Can Hill and finishes over at Bonnie Doon Oval in West Albury.

Funny thing is that the photo represents the order in which they finished the race!

John, 47:54 mins
Cade, 48:55 mins
Stuart & Lincoln 65:09 mins
Hannah 77:31 mins

and 30 he now is

30!
Cade has been waiting to turn 30 for a few years now, and it finally arrived over the weekend. He celebrated over pretty much the whole weekend, with a dinner out on saturday night, a 30km run on sunday morning to celebrate the 30ishness and then cake and presents on sunday afternoon.
Tally & Moo waiting for the birthday boy
We placed a marathon type of ribbon across the finish line of the 30km run.
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Cade finishing the 30km run at 8:30am
Moo, Cade & Tally having birthday cake
Birthday cake time!
Tally, Cade, Alice & Maisie
Present time!
For the record, I ran 30km in 2hrs and 35mins
-Cade.

Lake to Lagoon 2008 course

UPDATE: Placed 15th in a time of 37:21mins.
Hopefully I will get a chance sometime this week to go for a jog along the course to remind myself of all the ups and downs.

For the record, I placed 14th last year with a time of 36:55mins. But I honestly don’t expect to perform anything like that this year.