A homage to loading screens.
A small piece of admin: a new category addition
Very eagle-eyed regular readers might have noticed that a few days ago I added a new category to the list of post categories over in the menus. It’s quite a rare event, to be honest: most of the categories have been there for many years, and new additions really don’t happen very often. Before this week, the last one I think was Being Crafty, which arrived several months ago.
Or, making the site more efficient
Back in March, I wrote about making my post publishing process on this blog a bit simpler. Well; that was really just a side effect. The main point of that post, and the process behind it, was to find a simple and cheap way to move this site onto HTTPS-based hosting, which I accomplished with an Azure Static Web App. The side effect was that the official way to deploy an Azure Static Web App is via Microsoft Oryx, run from a GitHub Action. So now, when I write a new post, I have a fairly ordinary workflow similar to what I’d use (and do use!) in a multi-developer team. I create my changes in a Git branch, create a GitHub pull request, merge that pull request, and the act of doing a merge kicks off a GitHub Action pipeline that fires up Oryx, runs Wintersmith, and produces a site image which Oryx then uploads to Azure. Don’t be scared of all the different names of all the steps: for me, it’s just a couple of buttons that sets off a whole Heath Robinson chain of events. If I was doing this in a multi-person team, the only real difference would be to get someone else to review the change before I merge it, just to make sure I haven’t said something completely stupid.
Or, keeping the site up to date
Well, hello there! This site has been on somethng of a hiatus since last summer, for one reason and another. There’s plenty to write about, there’s plenty going on, but somehow I’ve always been too busy, too distracted, too many other things going on to sit down and want to write a blog post. Moreover, there are more technical reasons that I’ve felt I needed to get resolved too.
Or, rather, no more analytics
Regular readers—or, at least, people who have looked at this site before the last month or two—might remember that it used to have a discreet cookie consent banner at the top of the page, asking if you consented to me planting a tracking cookie that I promised not to send to anyone else. It would pop up again about once a year, just to make sure you hadn’t changed your mind. If you clicked yes, you appeared on my Google Analytics dashboard. If you clicked no, you didn’t.
Or, digging out some old words
As it’s New Years Day, time for a new start and all that, I’ve … er … done what I said I was going to do back in November, and started to pull out posts from my previous blog, of twenty years ago, edit them and post them on here.
Or, some prehistory
A couple of times recently, I’ve mentioned that I’ve been pulling data off the hard drive of my old desktop computer, nested inside which was the home folders from the previous desktop computer, and nested inside those, those from the one before that. So, lots of rather old files to go through, and there will be more photos to post I promise. One thing I’ve uncovered that I didn’t think I had, though, was a text-only archive of the posts from my old blog.
A more recent one this time
A few weeks ago, I noted it was sixteen years since I first started writing this blog. Well, today, it’s a whole year since I relaunched it, as something of a lockdown exercise. It had taken most of my spare time in the summer, to go through all of the old posts, edit them, redesign the sight, and get the whole production pipeline up and running.
Or, how often should a blog update, and does it really matter?
It’s almost the end of August, already.
Well, not really
Back in the mists of time (well, January), I posted about the mechanism I use to keep track of ideas I’ve had for posts to write about, so I make sure that if I’m in the middle of something else and think “that would be a good blog post topic,” it doesn’t just get forgotten and allowed to wither.
Or, some ideas for tracking ideas
A few days ago, I mentioned in passing that there I have lots of ideas for topics to write about on here, and the backlog of ideas is slowly building up. What I didn’t say was: how I track the backlog and remember all those ideas; instead, I thought to myself, that would make an interesting post for another day. “Backlog” isn’t meant to be derogatory, by the way. I see it as a good healthy thing, that I have lots of ideas that I haven’t as yet have had the time or energy or inclination to turn into words yet. Better that than a dearth of things I want to talk about, after all; that’s what would make this site slowly dry up and wither.
Or, finishing off the odds and ends
Settling down to see what else I should write in the series of posts about how I rebuilt this website, I realised that the main issues now have already been covered. The previous posts in this series have discussed the following:
Or, some of your questions answered
Time to answer some of the questions that have been sent in over the month or so since I revived this site.
Introducing Pug
If you want to start reading this series of articles from the start, the first part is here. In the previous part we discussed how I adapted Wintersmith to my purposes, adding extra page generators for different types of archive page, and refactoring them to make sure that I wasn’t repeating the same logic in multiple places, which is always a good process to follow on any sort of coding project. This post is about the templating language that Wintersmith uses, Pug. When I say “that Wintersmith uses”, incidentally, you should always add a “by default” rider, because as we saw previously adding support for something else generally wouldn’t be too hard to do.
In which we delve into Wintersmith and some CoffeeScript
Previously, I discussed some various possible ways to structure the coding of a website, and why I decided to rebuild this site around the static site generator Wintersmith. Today, it’s time to dive a little deeper into what that actually entailed. Don’t worry if you’re not a technical reader; I’ll try to keep it all fairly straightforward.
Or, how many different ways can you host a website?
I said the other day I’d write something about how I rebuilt the site, what choices I made and what coding was involved. I’ve a feeling this might end up stretched into a couple of posts or so, concentrating on different areas. We’ll start, though, by talking about the tech I used to redevelop the site with, and, indeed, how websites tend to be structured in general.
It's a new day, and so on
Well, hello there! Time to start all this up again.
In which we have an obscure font problem, in annoyingly specific circumstances
Only a day after the new garden blog went live, I found myself with a problem. This morning, I noticed a problem with it, on K’s PC. Moreover, it was only a problem on K’s PC. On her PC, in Firefox and in IE, the heading font was hugely oversized compared to the rest of the page. In Chrome, everything was fine.
In which an annex is announced
As you can see, as I’ve mentioned more than a few times already, this site has been fairly quiet for the past few months, since we’ve moved house. We’ve come up with a cunning solution, though. Start another blog!
In which we muse on how hard it is to write something with all the distractions the modern world has to offer
There’s one big problem with computers and pervasive connectivity. The problem is: it’s all at your fingertips. Which means, when you sit down to do some work, it’s all too easy to realise that there are other things you’d rather be doing; and there are a lot that can be done there and then.
In which things turn to treacle
I’ve noticed, over the past few months or so, that sometimes this site seems to load rather slowly. The slow periods didn’t seem to match any spikes in my own traffic, though, so I didn’t see that there was necessarily much I could do about it; moreover, as it wasn’t this site’s traffic that seemed to be causing the problem, I wasn’t under any obligation to do anything about it.
In which we measure monitors
The redesign is now almost done, which means that soon you’ll be saved from more posts on the minutiae of my redesign. It’s got me thinking, though: to what extent do I need to think about readers’ technology?
In which we discuss tagging and filksonomies
Another design point that’s come up as part of the Grand Redesign I keep promising you: tagging. The little bundle of links at the bottom of each post that I didn’t really think did very much.
In which we discuss similarities between books and blogging
Last week, in the last Book I Haven’t Read post, I mentioned By Hook Or By Crook by David Crystal, and predicted that – in contrast to the book I was actually writing about – I’d have By Hook Or By Crook rattled through and quickly finished off.
In which nothing, design-wise, is accomplished
As I mentioned recently, I’m embarking on a Grand Epic Ground-Upwards Redesign of this site, because, well, the design hasn’t been changed since I first set it up. I knocked it together in a few days holiday in August ’05; back then my holiday year ended in August and I often had a few spare days at the end of the month where I had nothing to do and needed to keep myself occupied. In 2005, this blog was the result.
In which we debate a design detail
Regular readers might have noticed that yesterday’s post was a bit of an experiment. In case you didn’t spot what the experiment involved, here’s a clue:
In which we discover more people read this site than we thought
I went for a drink with people from the office. This may have been a mistake – on the other hand, it’s better to know things.
In which we list things that I am too sleepy to write a proper post on
There are a lot, but after a long and stressful day at work, I don’t really want to sit down and write any of them up.
In which we notice the details
… noticing little details.
In which we wonder if an editor might help
Mike Troubled Diva recently posted a set of lecture notes on: going from blog to book. It’s an interesting read, and touches on one element that I, struggling to come up with something to put down on screen, have been thinking about a lot lately. If you’re a blogger, you don’t have anyone to restrain you, or point you in the right direction.
In which I have nothing to say for once
I’m waiting for that little spark to strike. I’m not sure why it hasn’t. Maybe it’s the lack of energy at the moment. I feel drained.
In which we make sure everything is shiny-new
And on the subject of procrastination, I’ve finally got around to making sure this site is running on the latest version of WordPress. Hurrah! I’m normally slightly reluctant to upgrade, on the grounds that the upgrade procedure is very long and detailed, and involves deleting most of the site to reinstall the new one. So you have to take the site down,* and if anything goes wrong it might stay down. I know that doesn’t really matter for a frivolous site like this, but it makes me wary.
In which we plan for the year ahead
…because in a year’s time, so many more moments will have passed. And I don’t want to have wasted any of them.
In which we pretend to break something
I’ve noticed I’ve been a bit lax updating recently – if you look on the sidebar, you’ll notice these past few months have had far fewer posts than before. Back in January I said to myself that I was going to try to update every day. As you can see, I haven’t been managing it.
In which things get recorded
Today is apparently One Day In History, a day for creating a “mass blog” which will be stored by the British Library. It sounds like an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced.
In which a year has passed
One year ago today, I wrote:
In which Big Dave breaks the law
I’ve been thinking about having a new feature on the site: Readers’ Letters. I get you to write in with questions that aren’t suitable for a normal comment-box entry, and I answer them. I was thinking of doing it today, in fact, but I couldn’t be bothered to make all the questions up as well as the answers. So, if you have anything you want to ask, email my usual address: feedback at symbolicforest.com
Or, you are reading these words
When I write things here, I don’t think about who might be reading them. Most of the time, I write posts to entertain an itch in my head. I get it down in words, and then I forget about it. The readers, if I do think about them, are the crowd of maybe 20 people who I know personally, who I know read this site fairly regularly.*
Or, to recap
If this week seems to have gone quickly, it’s because I haven’t been blogging very much. My social life is getting the better of me.
In which we wonder if things should be more regular
The other day, I wrote a post that essentially said: “today was a Thursday, but it felt like a Friday“. The next day – when it was still the top post on the page – Gordon replied: “hang on, it is Friday!”
In which we wonder what we’re hiding
Gordon has written something very interesting about why he likes reading blogs.
In which we ponder competition among blog hosting companies
Back in the mists of time, I wrote about Jakob Nielsen‘s top ten blog design mistakes. Including: not having your own domain name. My response: there are several sites I read and respect that do do this, but if you want to be completely sure you control your own reputation, you need to control your domain name too.
In which we think about design and credibility
Going back on last week’s post on Jakob Nielsen‘s top ten blog design mistakes: his Number Two Mistake is: no author photo on the site. Thinking about it, out of all the mistakes on his list, that’s almost certainly the most commonly-made.
In which we consider how well this site scores against Nielsen’s standard
Website design and usability expert Dr Jakob Nielsen has published his list of the top ten blog design mistakes. So, I thought I’d go through the list and see how many of them I’m making.
In which I am easily (and correctly) stereotyped
A strange day at work yesterday, and one in which I was instantly, quickly, and very correctly stereotyped.
In which we consider the mechanics of tagging
Feeling at a loose end, I’ve been experimenting with possible ways of adding Technorati tags to the posts here, without making them unreadable. There are three ideas I’m trying:
In which we consider what modern blogging is and isn’t
More from The Guardian: in the UK, an entire third of the 14-21 age group have started their own blog.
In which we discuss the name of this site
So far, I haven’t tried to explain the name of this site; and nobody’s asked, probably because very few people read it. I thought it up whilst sitting one afternoon on Doncaster station, waiting for a rather late train, and ever since I’ve been worried that it’s too pretentious.
In which we discuss taxonomies
Yesterday’s post made me think about blogging slightly, because I found myself creating a new category just to put it in. I’m still not sure how I should be creating categories, so I wasn’t entirely sure if I was doing the right thing.
In which I provide blogging advice
A few weeks ago, after I’d just bought the hosting and domain name for this site, one of the friendlier managers at work came up to me in the office…
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