this blog of mine

An important blogging tip

Do you want to join in the new retro fad of blogging like it’s 1999? I have an important tip to make the experience better for you and your readers, be they actual people, bots, AI or perhaps hyper-intelligent farm animals.

An example of a hyper-intelligent farm animal. Also, you should watch Gravity Falls.

That tip is:

Never remote-link to images

I made it big because it’s important. You see, back in the olden times of badly-compressed JPGs and animated GIFs that were the size of postage stamps, there was this unspoken assumption that the internet (or more specifically, the World Wide Web1LanguageTool is insisting I capitalize this and I’m not in the mood to argue part of it) was forever. If something made it to the net, it stayed there. Everyone had a site or a blog or a page under construction, and it was messy and great.

Then the big companies moved in and basically paved over all of that. The do-it-yourself sites like GeoCities, Angelfire and others went away. Blogrolls turned into quaint relics. Algorithms and feeds took their place. And really, it seems a lot of people are happy today to just scroll through slop content made by machines others.

But the lesson for you, the brave new blogger, is this: Despite the Internet Archive (bafflingly the victim of an attack as I type this), and other efforts to preserve the web days of yore, there’s a decent chance that the witty image you link to in a blog post will be gone in seven years. Or maybe even next week. It could get deleted by the host, or moved. Maybe the site it’s hosted on vanishes into the ether. The point is, when you remote-link to an image, you are gambling that the image will stay put. And I am here to tell you it will not.

See the image above? I found it doing a search for “super smart Waddles”. But the copy you’re looking at is one I’m hosting myself. As long as I maintain my blog, the image will remain. The pig stays, because I brought the pig home.

Blog smart, fellow writers!

WordPress alternatives: October 2024 update

Another excuse to post an old-timey typewriter photo. Photo by Min An.

Short: I still haven’t found one.

Longer: The ones I’ve tried so far don’t have the right level of flexibility and customization that I want.

There are a lot of blogging platforms out there and they all excel at letting you put words onto the internet.

But I want more than words. I am a visual person, so I like including photos, images and things. Some blogging sites focus only on words, some allows images with limits, but very few seem to just let you freely mix both with abandon.

I want abandon.

Ghost probably comes the closest, but it’s $9/month (US, so closer to $12 per month for me) and that’s the basic plan, which doesn’t even let you use custom themes.

There’s Blogtastic, which sounds good on paper, but there’s no way to try it out other than paying, and I have enough doubts about performance, etc. to hesitate.

Beyond that is the world of static site generators, but I don’t want to host, configure and deal with backend nonsense. I do enough of that now. I just want to post words and pictures, to do so at reasonable cost and in a way that lets me relatively easily export my work if I decide to pull up stakes.

Summary: I continue to ponder. I am feeling an urge to start some kind of more focused writing project, though. Maybe I should just write a short story. 😛

The angry screeds are coming from inside the blog

UPDATE, September 27, 2024: Fixed some details. Also, here is a longish piece by Josh Collinsworth that covers the whole sorry affair in detail. The only thing missing is Mullenweg's announcement to give WP Engine a four-day "reprieve", written in the same churlish tone as everything else he's put out recently. I would not invite this guy to your next birthday party.

It seems that a dispute has erupted between WordPress and WP Engine, a company that makes use of WordPress in ways that the WordPress founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg apparently does not like. There are cease and desist letters, lawyers and all that involved now.

This has led to a couple of unusual entries in the normally quiet WordPress Events and News section of my blog’s dashboard, as seen below.

Clicking the links (you can’t click them in the image, sorry!) will lead to the WP founder saying mean things about WP Engine, even calling it a “cancer.” He had threatened to bad mouth WP Engine at a major public WP event (ironically sponsored in part by WP Engine) if WP engine didn’t share some of their sweet lucre with him through some vaguely defined licensing something-or-other that Matt appeared to have invented very recently. WP Engine asked for more time, Matt took that as no and the bad-mouthing took place). It’s ugly all around.

And what this person–the CEO and founder of WordPress–has done has made people start to question the actions of WordPress as an organization, and how much it can be trusted moving forward. It takes a long time to build a good reputation, but only moments to ruin one.

I was already revisiting my (ever)quest to move my blogging, and this is…helping. I’m not sure if that’s the outcome Matt Mullenweg was looking for.

A review of my current domains

Or, How I Am Really Reluctant to Let Things Go.

I saw this on Mastodon (I am sure it’s been making its rounds on all the socials for some time) and it reminded me of the domains I have let go in the past. None of them were dropped for financial reasons–back when I dropped a few of them, the cost of renewing was as low as $10 a year.

But there’s a psychological weight to holding onto something you (secretly) know you’re never going to use, and so I let them go. I am currently paying for five domains right now, which is not a big number in the grand scheme of things, but seems like a lot of domains for one random dude to have.

Let’s see where they stand!

  • creolened.com. This domain! It’s been running as a WordPress blog since February 2005, so its 20th birthday will be coming up soon. This is the one domain I actively use.
  • stanwjames.com. This is my name and it’s a domain. If I was advertising for a job or something, I’d probably slap something on it. I have occasionally thought of moving everything from creolened.com to this domain, but ultimately I don’t have a compelling reason to do so.
  • gumgumpeople.com. Currently a bare-bones WordPress site. I may do more with this in the next few years. Even if I don’t, I’ll keep it around (hee hee).
  • gumgumgames.com. This is idle, but could be used if I ever finish a game.
  • doodlingsandnoodlings.com. This was meant to be a place for my writing and drawing (sort of a more focused version of creolened.com), hence the name, but I never quite put together a plan for it. Also, I regularly forget if doodlings or noodlings comes first. This is another maybe for future use.

All of my domains, then, are currently safe, even though most will still remain idle. But you never know, the future is unwritten and all that jazz. Maybe I’ll start posting cat pictures to all of them.

I have successfully spammed in August 2024!

For the first time since October 2023, I have posted an average of two posts per day in a single month (31 days, 62 posts).

This is not exactly one of the great achievements of my life, but it does signal that I was finally able to get into the habit of posting more regularly again, and more specifically, not getting hung up on what to post, just posting whatever.

I believe I have achieved posting whatever.

Onto September!

But first, it’s time for you-know-who again. That’s right, typing cat!

Blogging: On the other hand…

When I think about moving from WordPress to something perhaps simpler and easier to manage, it also occurs to me that since October 2023 I’ve not exactly struggled to post, but my output of roughly 2 posts per day has dipped to something like 1.1 posts per day. Maybe I don’t have enough to say anymore to warrant switching to another (paid) service.

Or maybe I’m just in a creative funk.

Or maybe I’m lazier than I used to be.

So many possibilities.

I will continue to ponder.

Meanwhile, here is a smart-looking cat1Yes, I’ve used this one before. Like I said, I’m lazy. I mean, I’m recycling and saving e-trees or something.:

Blogging and thinking about blogging (includes blogging)

I saw a link on Mastodon1aka the one social media platform I still use that led me to write.as, which is one of the blogging solutions I pondered when I was thinking a lot about moving away from WordPress. Then some things happened:

  • I got distracted (this happens a lot)
  • The easier route of just tolerating WordPress and doing nothing settled in and took root
  • Not to mention, I know WordPress quite well after using it for almost 20 (!) years, so there’s muscle memory and all that encouraging me to stay put

But as someone who hopefully isn’t just an AI scraping my blog for weirds and probably untrue things to add to the AI Slurry of Knowledge (SOK), you may have noticed I’ve also been engaged in something I call The Culling for the last few years. I can’t recall if I’ve ever fully explained what it is, but it’s pretty simple.

The Culling, explained

  1. Big corporations are generally bad
  2. Big tech corporations seem to be extra bad, in that, “You think YOU’RE bad? Hold my beer. Hold all of my beers” way.
  3. Growing increasingly disenchanted, while also experience things like subscription fatigue, I have begun The Culling. The Culling is meant to move me away from services and software offered by Big Tech™ and to use either free (possibly even FOSS) or paid options from smaller companies that still see their customers as humans and want to treat them fairly, a radical notion on the current interweb.

WordPress has made some dumb (IMO) moves regarding AI and are generally heading in a direction I don’t like. Also, the platform is bloated, creaking and there’s way more here than I need to just write inane things and post pictures on a daily basis to an audience of one to five people, of whom I count myself. Thus began the search for a replacement, which would also be part of The Culling.

And then lazy, too easy to do nothing, etc.

But now I’m looking again. I feel I’ve somehow managed to tap into one of those moments where I am invigorated for [x] period of time, and I am seizing it to move forward in several areas, one of which is this here blogging thing.

I will report back soon or soon-like.

Every month it’s the same

For a long while I averaged two posts per day, which seemed like a good thing, somehow. It kept my mind agile or some other buzzword. But since November 2023 I have not been able to muster the will to post much more than once per day. Why is that?

I do not know. I have theories. Stress is probably a big one. Falling out of the habit may be another. Maybe I’m just lazy or going through a protracted creative funk, or PCF as scientists call it.

Since there’s only one day left in the month and this is post #37 for July, it seems rather unlikely that I will crank out 25 posts between today and tomorrow to hit the two-per-day average. I mean, it’s theoretically possible, and I am mildly curious what sort of spammy nonsense I’d write about to generate so many posts in so little time.

But I probably won’t.

But maybe I will!

But probably not.

Here is a squirrel on a stump at Burnaby Lake:

Save, don’t update

In WordPress, if you publish a post and later make changes to it, the Publish button changes to Update, to let you know that you’re, well, updating the post.

But in version 6.6, just released, that Update button now says Save, which is more old school, but actually makes less sense in terms of publishing something (as opposed to saving a file like a word processing document). I don’t hate the change, but it seems a bit weird and doesn’t really improve anything.

However, they haven’t made anything else objectively worse with this update (that I’ve found), so kudos for that!

Also, yes, I’ve kind of stopped looking for other alternatives to WordPress since finally committing to my site redesign. I still might resume that search, but it’s on the back burner again for now. Apologies to anyone waiting for me to render a verdict!

Have I lost my blogging mojo?

Yes, I have.

I am not sure why. Last year I was fairly regularly averaging two posts per day, but this year I’ve sometimes struggled just to get an average of one per day, or to just post at all on some days.

I wonder what has changed, but have no real answers. I don’t think it’s anything like “long covid” or associated brain fog, because it would have kicked in sooner, I think. Or maybe not.

I can explain the lack of a post for yesterday, though: I am experiencing either a nasty seasonal allergy reaction, or have some kind of cold (I lean toward allergies, given the symptoms, time of year and the fact that my partner, who typically brings germs home from the university, remains healthy). I have taken allergy relief pills to help reduce symptoms and as I type this, I feel better than when I first got up. But that only explains yesterday.

Maybe I am seeing the world slightly differently now. The last year has kind of soured me on people in general, and institutions and, well, a lot of things. I seek solace in simple things now. I long to be in places that are quiet, where I can be alone, and not hear the drone of cars, or the chatter of others. I am worn down by the ever-present displays of selfishness and stupidity. It feels like it is all around me.

Whoa, this is deep ‘n depressing. Normally I would end a post like this in a somewhat glib manner, by posting an animated GIF of a cat being silly.

And you know what? That’s exactly what I’m going to do! With one of the classics.

Also, it’s sunny today, which is nice and something of a change for this soggy, damp spring of ours. The weather might be a factor, too.

Anyway, cat:

I need a fancy new logo

With the site redesign mostly complete, I think I need a new logo, something that isn’t just literally the name of the site. Yes, I know it’s clean and efficient, but it’s also sterile and blah.

I still want something sleek and uncluttered. I will ponder.

When I tinkered around in Canva, I ended up with this:

It both does and doesn’t speak to me. It’s also full of hidden meaning that no one else would ever figure out.

But the actual logo will probably not feature a jar of pickles.