this blog of mine

Update on site update: Breaking all the things

Yesterday I started tweaking and experimenting with menus on the blog again and along the way, something went weirdly and spectacularly wrong. For a time, the site looked like this:

Would you care for links to every page from the last 18 years? At the top of the site? Good news!

Some of the pages linked in the header, like Short story names, were not even set to be publicly viewable, but somehow ended up displaying, anyway.

I did a restore via Dreamhost, which was imprecise (you don’t pick a specific restore point, just a vague timeframe), but worked, save for three images I had to manually recover. Once I repaired the damage, I went back to looking at kittens on the internet and pondered what to do going forward.

My site is actually quite old for a blog. I started it 18 (!) years ago, in February 2005. Blogs were kind of a big deal back then. Through many themes and redesigns, the blog has mustered on, but along the way it has accumulated piles of cruft, weird bits of code and parts of it feel like they will collapse if you touch them even ever-so-gently.

Yesterday’s menu fiasco has cooled me on mucking with the design for now, but it has got me thinking about what to do moving forward. I am undecided, but can rule out a few things:

  • Going back to coding HTML and CSS by hand, like it’s 1999
  • Leaving the site as-is indefinitely
  • Giving up, curling into a fetal position, and lapsing into a permanent fugue state about “the good old days”

Hopefully the next update about this blog will read less like an autopsy report.

Do not be alarmed (at my site)

I have started experimenting with bringing some menus back to my blog, so my photo galleries and other things are visible again. I’ve also slapped in a smaller temporary site logo. All of this may change, but for now, enjoy three sets of photos I took at Reifel, plus a direct link once again to Angry Carrot vs. Quirky Bastards.

UPDATE, a short time later: I’ve already moved the menus from the top to an item in the right sidebar and ditched the temporary site logo. Who knows what I’ll do next!

Engagement is down. Solution: FREE BEER!

By which I mean this image:

Bonus points if you recognize what cartoon this is from

Very slightly more seriously, Jetpack offered me these stats for the past month:

320 visitors
375 views

Sure, it may not seem like a lot, but it’s 100% organic! Just like the ingredients in the imaginary beer I’m offering.

Jetpack shows I’ve barely hit double digits this week, though:

That’s actually better than what the site has done historically, where it’s usually been in the single digits. The only thing I can think is a couple of LLMs are now scraping the site and hoping I don’t sue them like Twitter did.

If none of this makes sense in the future, welcome to the world of 2023.

Serif vs. Sans serif: Fight!

UPDATE: I have turned radical and am now using the serif typeface Bitter for headings. Anarchy!

I’ve been thinking about my blog redesign, as I do periodically, and have read several articles arguing in favour of using serif fonts for body text on websites. The old belief was that text on screen evolved to be mainly sans serif because low resolution screens made serifs harder to read, as they couldn’t be rendered well. Now with fancy™ screen technology and higher resolutions, that’s not a problem, so it’s time to return to serifs for body text, following the lead of virtually all novels and most books in general.

And yet I cannot find a serif I like. They all look too thin or too fat, or too fancy. Part of it is laziness, because the theme I use, the excellent GeneratePress, offers a list of dozens of Google fonts, but it isn’t trivially easy to deviate from the list. And I am lazy, so trivially easy is important. But I will keep poking at it.

For now, I am using Heebo for body text again, because it’s a clean-looking sans serif font, plus the name is adorable.

Also, I’ve tried going through some “best fonts” lists and as you might imagine, a lot of them are SEO-driven junk. But there’s a few out there! I will expand on this post later.

(And yes, I know the difference between a typeface and font, but that battle is long since lost for the pedants.)

My apologies to the internet

Earlier this year, I gave myself permission to post whatever I wanted to this blog–no more filters, no more forbidden topics. If I wanted to say it, I’d say it.

I’ve noticed lately that a lot of what I’ve been writing seems kind of cranky, and I don’t want to come across as a cranky person. I have had a terrible flu bug recently, and am still getting past the last bits of it and this has certainly soured my overall mood, but I just seem to be taking on lots of negative stuff–mostly on the web–then spewing bile here because of it. Some of the targets are pretty easy, admittedly. And I really believe grocery stores are gouging customers and that makes me angry, because food isn’t optional, and it rankles me that these people will get away with it because our federal government is ultimately too spineless to do anything about it.

But see, there I go again! Cranky! Angry!

I will still feel the way I feel, but there’s no need to project it to the Large Language Models scraping this site to help some future 14-yewar-old write their book report.

This is my way of saying I am going to try to focus on more creative, whimsical and/or entertaining stuff to post. And kittens, of course.

But first, a nice shot I took today of Burnaby Lake (it’s there under all the lily pads):

Redesign hell ~or~ How not to change your blog after 18 years

I started this blog in February 2005, which means it’s 18 years old. In Canada, that means my blog can drive, vote in federal elections and join the army. It has to wait a bit longer before it can gamble.

But I don’t have to wait, and gamble I did!

Since WordPress has no easy way to work in a staged environment, when you want to make changes, you either have to go through the rigmarole of setting up a local server, or just make changes on your live site and hope for the best.

Which is what I’ve been doing the last few days.

What I have learned:

  • After 18 years, my site has accumulated a lot of legacy cruft
  • This cruft can do interesting and/or alarming things when you poke at it
  • Different parts connect in unexpected ways. Imagine if your elbows connected to your knees, it’s kind of like that.
  • Things that should work logically will often defy logic
  • Sometimes it turns out to be user error
  • More than a few times, really
  • But not always!
  • Planning ahead is a good thing to do
  • I should have planned ahead, which I did not do
  • But even just starting on this journey, I have cleaned up a lot of that cruft:
    • Old, inactive widgets have been purged
    • Outdated links and thingies have been removed
    • Legacy stuff has been converted over to blocks where possible
    • I’ve backed up all the weird CSS changes that are in Simple CSS
    • I’ve documented every weird thing I’m likely to forget
  • I’ve experimented with colours, but right now it’s just a sedate green/grey combo
  • I will actually need to figure out what I want to show up front and what will be tucked away

Currently, the site looks a lot more green. I added some nice rounded corners on the individual posts because round corners are the new hot thing. But it’s otherwise pretty stripped down and ready for more serious remodelling. This stuff takes a lot of time, so I’m not sure how quickly it will happen, but at least I’ve started.

A tale of too many plugins

Yesterday’s site shenanigans have now been resolved, and it made me realize I had way too many unused plugins hanging around, doing nothing except potentially causing problems (which one did, yesterday).

I’ve deleted a bunch and will delete a bunch more before I’m done. This will also help with the site redesign, so I will later claim it was part of the plan all along, somehow.

And now, another cat:

Proposed site logo, 2023 edition

Yeah, I’m still mulling the site redesign. I’ll get to it eventually. Probably.

In the meantime, I used Canva and some stock objects and background to make this:

And this:

Both are magical. I didn’t even notice I’d used a Star Trek font in the second one until later.

Also, apparently I have a thing for pickles? How Freudian!

Now, I won’t actually use these for site logos, but part of me really wants to. I will continue to mull what to really do…

This blog of mine: A 2023 reflection of sorts

Stats as of Wednesday, March 15, 2023

On February 2, 2005 I wrote my first post on this blog. You can read it here (it’s a mere single paragraph): Bloggity blog blog

In fact, why even make you click? Here it is, in its entirely:

I was the last one to get bell bottom jeans in grade 5 and now I’m the last person on the Internet to have a blog. Hooray for me! As you may have guessed, I am using WordPress for my blogging needs. An apparent feature of WordPress is relentless self-promotion, as witnessed by the three separate links for the software on this very page. I’ll be culling a few soon and adding some other links that might prove interesting or not.

Me, February 2, 2005

Not exactly a fascinating debut, but actual interesting writing eventually made its way to the site.

Eventually.

Here are some 2005 fun facts:

  • Facebook didn’t exist
  • Twitter didn’t exist
  • Netflix existed but only rented out DVDs
  • Blockbuster still existed
  • The current version of Windows was Windows XP
  • I had hair (I would keep it for six more years)
  • I was 40 years old, which seems almost kind of young now (scary)

Today, I came across a story about an even older blog–https://kottke.org/. He has a billion more posts than me, has had an actual impact on the web (he created the permalink!) and has been on TV. It made me wonder what sort of impact my blog and its 4280 posts has had on the world, and whether that matters.

I suppose it doesn’t matter as long as the blog entertains me, or serves some kind of useful function for me (I think it does). But I do sometimes ponder about starting up another blog with a tighter focus (reworking this site would seem to almost go against the chaotic randomness of it). But the problem with going with a tighter focus is…my brain tends to wander all over the place. Imagine it with legs and a cute little suitcase. I write, I draw, I take photos, I run, I ponder, I make lists, I post things I find amusing or stupid. I complain (I have long-struggled to minimize the latter).

And in the end, I never do make that other more focused site, because I am not a focused person. At least not yet. Let’s see if I am for the 25th anniversary of this blog. Only seven years to go!

I don’t know what to write, send help!

Actually, it’s probably more than I can’t focus long enough to sit down and write something. In any case, I intend to start cranking up the old writing machine in the next few days, seeing if I can hit a goal of an average of two posts per day for the month (62 total). As of right now, I am 10 posts behind. That’s a lot of McTopics. I need to get cracking.

Here’s a haiku to start. I even wrote it myself instead of outsourcing it to ChatGPT!

Time to Write

Time to get writing
Put fingers on the keyboard
Magic gushes out

Er, maybe I’ll try another haiku tomorrow.