this blog of mine

A goose with a pipe (Welcome to my blog, 2024 edition)

Probably my most-used Signal sticker.
What does it say about me? Speculate!

Hello! If you are not a bot or LLM scraping this site to help churn out AI-based internet flotsam, then welcome to my blog! I don’t know how you got here, but if you stick around for a few moments, here are a few things you may find useful to know as of January 2024:

  • I like lists
  • I frequently write about my jogging (three times a week, usually). This is probably not interesting to anyone but me, but I never found another good place to write about it. I at least include a photo or two in these posts for you to enjoy as you scroll past.
  • Other popular topics include:
    • Book reviews (these have fallen off in the last few years).
    • Complaining about Apple (they’re big and carry an outsized impact on us, so I hold them to a higher standard; I am trying to reduce complaining in general, though).
    • Technology (I am not an engineer or anything fancy like that).
    • This blog (I often go meta).
    • Birding (started this back in 2021).
    • Writing prompts (both creating and using them).
    • Photography (mostly birds–see above) and drawing. I don’t get into the technical aspects of photography, I just post my photos.
  • Like a dinosaur, I use WordPress’s Categories.
  • I have plans to redesign the blog, but until I do, some things, like photo galleries, are hard or even impossible to find. This is bad and I feel bad.
  • Generally, I write about whatever I want to write about.
  • Last year, I gave myself permission to write about anything that popped into my head. I have done this multiple times since.
  • I have a Mac and a PC. I generally prefer the PC. I do my drawing on an iPad Pro.
  • My tone can be sarcastic at times. I try never to be mean. I think life, in a way, is absurd, and my writing here may reflect this at times.
  • Starting this year (2024) I am writing a monthly newsletter called Doodlings and Noodlings1We’ll see if this one comes back to haunt me.
  • I am working on my first video game. It should come out this year2We’ll see if this one also comes back to haunt me. Also, I like using footnotes..
  • I am white, male, Canadian, left-handed (but I use a mouse right-handed) and gay.

That’s about it for now. Thanks for reading. I don’t have comments turned on due to spam, but if you want to say something to me, or just send me an inscrutable emoji, I can be reached on Mastodon here: @stanjames@mstdn.social (I’m on other social media platforms, but rarely check or post to them these days. I’m a very low-key social rebel). You can also reach me using old-timey email here: ned@creolened.com

I’m kind of tired of WordPress

photo of man using laptop
Pretend it’s me blogging on WordPress. I would be wearing socks, though. God, I love stock photos. Photo by Canva Studio on Pexels.com

EDIT: Shortly after posting this, I came across a list of blogging platforms in a post on Mastodon. Coincidence or serendipity? Or both? Coincendipity?

This isn’t a complaint about WordPress! WordPress is a rich, diverse tool that can sing, dance and probably rub its belly at the same time. I’ve been using it for this blog since 2005–around 19 years! Obviously, it’s been doing a decent job of letting me get my inane thoughts online, or I would have switched to something else by now1Or become a crazed hermit living in the mountains, eschewing all technology, perhaps.

So why am I tired of it?

It’s big, bulky, and jammed full of features, many of which I don’t use. Its company, Automattic, is increasingly pushing even standalone blogs like this one toward monetization, with plugins like Jetpack having more and more paid features under the premise that if you are using WordPress, you are intending to make money from it, otherwise why aren’t you just posting your cat pictures to Facebook for the price of free2Not counting the price of YOUR ETERNAL SOUL?

What I yearn for is something that is light, clean and simple to use, yet still allows me to do the bloggy things I like:

  • Write down my inane thoughts
  • Write lists, like this one
  • Post photos and drawings
  • Present these things in some kind of organized manner

I feel that WordPress has moved away from the simplicity of humble, handcrafted artisanal blogging. I want to get back there again. I want to touch (virtual) paper.

Where to go next

(I didn’t really need a subheading here, but you see them a lot on important blog think pieces, and I’m always keen to look fancy and smart.)

My choices are roughly as follows:

  • Keep using WordPress and just shut up about it. It works, right?
  • Actually switch to a WordPress alternative.
  • Stop blogging altogether.
  • Post my cat pictures on Facebook for free3I would also need to get a cat.

I’m actually unsure which option to pursue. The last few years I’ve been, in some ways, reconstructing many aspects of my life, and I don’t always know where these things will lead. I suppose this makes it exciting. Whee!

I have no emojis and I must :(

WordPress supports emojis. Behold: 🙂

However, there are two types of emojis:

  1. Emojis that are converted from emoticon text such as :) turning into a happy face
  2. Emojis that are entered using an emoji picker, such as the one in Windows 11:

The former work fine on this blog, but because the database goes all the way back to the ancient internet time of 2005, it uses an old type of character encoding that can’t handle emojis and turns them into question marks instead, like so: ??

This means creolened.com can never show the full and resplendent range of emojis.

🙁

I could convert the database over to accommodate this, but that risks mucking things up on a sitewide scale. And as much as I’d <31WordPress support suggest this should auto-convert to a heart emoji, but alas it does not appear to do so. to have a full array of emojis to draw from, as I am a silly person, I am also at least a little practical.

😳

creolened.com Post #4,823

I’m doing this because I am easily amused.

Reference here: https://birchtree.me/blog/make-good-shit/

4,823 translates to about 253 posts per year, or 21 posts per month. That’s not bad when you consider how seldomly I posted in the early years of this blog (especially 2005-2015 or so). I’m not saying the quality has improved at the same rate, but there’s some decent stuff here, and in the near future, I will try to make it easier to find, so that others can better question my sense of humour, priorities, and fashion sense.

Also, here is a birch tree, as depicted by AI:

Greetings from iA Writer (again)

Hello.

This is another test post written in iA Writer (which just had a big, though non-publishing on other platforms, update), and then magically sent to my WordPress blog, where you are reading it right now, if this worked.

Also, here is a photo of some freaky, somewhat face-shaped fungus at Burnaby Lake:

Fake edit: Publishing from iA Writer is clunky and requires clean-up after. iA Writer’s documentation on this is incomplete. I won’t be doing it again, but without experiments, how would we ever blow things up learn?

I have nothing to say

I think my brain is temporarily broken. I’m in one of those weird phases where the more I try to think of something to blog about, the less I can think of anything to write.

I want to be more positive, and that narrows down possible topics because, let’s face it, complaining about stuff is easy and fun. Fun for a time, at least.

Instead, I’ll just post this haiku about not being able to write anything.

A haiku to an absence of words

I sit down to write
My brain shuts off at the thought
Words huddle inside

Note: I will not be writing 24 posts today

For some time I’ve had an informal rule on this blog to write a post per day or what works out to be a post per day by the end of the month (30 days = 30 posts), then I started going a bit overboard and making it two per day.

At the end of last month, I was 16 posts short of that two per day goal, but I took it upon myself as a challenge and cranked out 16 posts on the last day of the month. It was a little nutty, and kind of fun.

I have been even more derelict in posting this month, meaning I would need to add 24 new posts this month to come up to the magic number of 60.

And I am not doing that.

23 more posts to go!

But I will provide another amusing cat image for having read this far:

Freedom, terrible freedom

A little while back, I gave myself permission to post whatever I liked to this blog, with no filters:

  • Complaints? Sure! Though I try to minimize them.
  • Lists? I love lists.
  • Writing prompts? The sillier, the better. My inspiration.
  • Running updates? These are very skippable if you’re not me, though I started adding photos in the last year so at least there are pretty pictures as you scroll past.
  • Drawings and doodlings? When I have stuff to show, sure.
  • Self-referential posts about the blog like this one? Oh yes.
  • Recipes? No. Or not yet, anyway.
  • Things I like? Sometimes!
  • Reviews? I review every book I read, though my book reading cratered with the pandemic. I also review movies, but watch far fewer now, also a change since the pandemic. And sometimes I do not choose wisely, like when I thought watching Moonfall might be a good use of my time.
  • Other random stuff? I like random stuff.

All of this is a way of saying that I am again having a hard time coming up with stuff to write about, though there should be lots for me to ramble on about. I think I am afraid that anything I write might come out as a complaint because the world is, in many ways, kind of awful (See? I’m kind of doing it right now!) and it feels hard to avoid. I don’t want to just slap on a happy face and pretend everything is groovy, either.

Usually this is where I end with a random cat, but for a change of pace, here is a random sign I photographed a few weeks back1It’s found on the bins in parks for disposing of dog poop. It looks somewhat cooler when seen in isolation :

I am retro

When I look at my current blog design (captured in screenshot form below for posterity, and for when it inevitably changes) it occurs to me that it is quite retro and I hadn’t consciously realized it. Today, I happened to look at someone else’s blog and it was very typical of what you see on most sites–clean white expanses, black text, little in the way of links or other clutter. Just the posts and that’s about it.

Conversely, my site currently:

  • Slaps you in the face with not one, but two bright colours, one that surrounds that traditional black text on white “standard” look.
  • Has a Categories list. Seriously, this is a standard part of WordPress, but I seldom ever come across it elsewhere.
  • An Archives dropdown. Also pretty rare and another built-in part of WordPress. This one is mostly for me, though. Also, easily seeing how many posts I’ve made per month is oddly satisfying.
  • The design isn’t cluttered, exactly, but it isn’t overly spacious, either. I feel most sites have a lot more white space. Mine is…cozier? Maybe it’s just more cramped.

And I’ve actually stripped away a lot of the stuff I used to have. The menus at the top are gone, the logo is now just text.

Maybe one day I’ll finish that redesign. For now, I’ll probably just continue to add bits back, content to have a blog that looks very 2005.

My site, as of November 14, 2023:

The tags page is back, woo

close up photography of brown tags
Photo by Jess Bailey Designs on Pexels.com

A couple of things to note here:

  • The Tags (all of them) page is back and can now be found at the bottom of the right sidebar (unless I arbitrarily move it)
  • There are a lot of tags
  • I mean, there are over 400 tags
  • Most of the tags are weird and only appear once
  • This is a great way to explore posts on the site that aren’t a) about my jogging b) me complaining about Apple or c) my current weight
  • I previously used a plugin but am now using a shortcode. Currently, it:
    • displays tags in alphabetical order
    • shows a count for how many times each tag has been used
    • does NOT show tags starting with numbers or other special characters. This is only a few tags, but I may add these back in later
  • Enjoy!

The secret to blog success is to post nothing!

Or so it would seem, looking at the stats for this blog of mine.

I usually have 10–30 visitors to the site per day, which is fine because I don’t advertise or promote in any way, there’s no definable hook (it’s just me posting whatever, plus lots of jogging updates) and the design is nothing special.

But then, on November 9th (two days ago as I type this), I got over 400 visitors. I did not post that day. The day before I posted about my knee, which I suspect is not a huge draw, though I did post a link to a Charlie Stross talk that I found entertaining and on-point the day after.

But still, weird.

Anyway, to anyone who visited, please root around, you’re bound to find something at least mildly entertaining. Maybe I’ll throw up (!) my gigantic page of tags again, that’s always good fun.

WordPress 6.4 is here!

I’m like Steve Martin in The Jerk1Yes, I am referencing a movie that came out in 1979. I am old. when the new phone book arrives2Remember phone books? I do, due to the aforementioned condition of being old.. So very excited!

Actually, I confess, I am not excited. The new features sound good, but I am concerned about further UI regressions. I see the Preview “hand iron” icon is still there, so that is not promising.

But I will maintain a positive outlook, because it feels like I’ve been crabby lately, and I don’t need to be crabby to drive engagement, because I don’t have engagement! I can be free to be positive, or thoughtful, or rambling, whatever I choose to be.

I have gotten off-track a bit.

Apparently, you can apply lightbox effects to images now. Let’s try that! I have checked the new Expand to click option for the image below, which should make it full-screen and all immersive up in the hizzzy.

Brunette River, going full fall

It seems to work. I’m not sure if I prefer this over the FooBox lightbox. Let’s try that one below and compare for science. Same image:

Brunette River, still going full fall

It looks like both pretty much give you the same larger image, but FooBox dims the rest of the browser window, retains the caption, and adds a border. On the other hand, the built-in lightbox plays a zippy animation when expanding the image to the larger size and feels all dynamic and modern.

On balance, I think I prefer the FooBox version, but I appreciate the new option1.

  1. Just like the footnotes WordPress added previously, which I occasionally use now, especially if I want my posts to look like high-falutin’ essays. ↩︎