One the things I don’t quite understand, is how Covid didn’t result in me writing shit loads of blog posts. It should have really, but instead, it absolutely killed the remains of my blogging.
Which is odd.
Tag Archives: blog
Yes, it’s back.
Turns out I still want to blog. So it’s back. I’ve managed to import all the old content, but,
- Links are probably broken
- I haven’t got (and won’t be using) all the plugins so you may see weird [text] in square brackets that would have previously triggered plugins, which no longer will (like pull-quotes, article lists, etc.)
- The import only partially worked, so tag counts and other things are off, I dunno if I’ll be able to fix them.
- I’ll be working on the look soon (re-doing icons, headers, etc.) but am not going to customise anything in the theme directly, or use a custom theme, because it just requires too much energy to maintain.
- Oh, and I’m never, ever turning comments back on.
I did think about fully exploiting https://www.eightbittony.co.uk but I just like the Perception Is Truth name, and I don’t want to give it up. So for now, they’ll both exist.
Articles and Sorting
Hmm, the 8bit Mid-life Crisis posts are increasing in number pretty quickly, and I think they’re going to break the ‘articles’ page. They already break the sorting which is alphabetical, so 10 comes before 2, and if I keep writing them at 1 a day, which is where I am at the moment, it’s going to outgrow that list of articles very quickly indeed.
That whole articles page was really a way of tying together a small number of posts on a particular topic, but I guess if I end up writing 10’s of posts for the Spectrum stuff, it’s not going to fit. Also, frankly, it’s a ball ache adding the custom fields which make the posts show up on that page.
So, I need to have a think and approach this in a different way. Maybe a simple 8bit Mid-life Crisis category would suffice. I tend to under-use the categories, and they do list the posts in reverse time order so that might work out okay.
Edit: Right, stuck with ‘Retro Computing’ category, which I’ll post all the Spectrum posts under. If you want to read them all, they’re there. You can also read a summary of all the kit, on the Retro Computing page.
Has twitter killed my blogging?
Do I blog less because I find it easier to write a couple of 140 character tweets than a full blog post? I think it may be true. Or maybe I just feel I’ve got less to say? Or maybe I feel that since no one reads this shit anyway, why bother saying it at all?
Hands off my content!
I gave up one of my domains a few months ago, the one relating to David Gemmell. I won’t repeat the domain here for reasons which will be obvious in a moment. Last night, I wondered wistfully if anyone had picked the domain up. A quick whois showed it had, and so I visited it in my browser to see what they were doing with it, hopeful it was being used to bring David’s fans together.
Sadly, rather than that, someone had basically taken my David Gemmell eulogy, and a brief bio, combined them as the only post on a WordPress install and stuck adverts between each of the paragraphs.
Maybe if it had been something less personal I would have simply ignored it, but that eulogy was very personal to me, despite me posting it to the web. It was still mine. There was no attribution on the post on the site in question, and although my eulogy finished with “I will miss you ….” the way it had been re-posted just to generate advertising revenue made it meaningless.
The whois entry didn’t give a contact e-mail address, so I tracked down the web host (same company as the domain registrar) and sent a polite e-mail to their support department, showing the original content on my blog, explaining that it was my copyright, and asking if they could please speak to the owner of the site.
In their defence, they replied in a few hours saying they would contact the owner, and this morning when I rechecked my content had gone. To be replaced by a generic Eco Advice post, interspersed with adverts. That same content is all over the web, including one site lovingly titled “ArticleSnatch”.
I sort of feel like writing back to the web host and saying the owner is doing it again, but this time they’re using generic content designed to convince search engines to send traffic their way, but frankly, I can’t be bothered. Now they’re not stealing my personal content, I can’t work up the enthusiasm to say much, and I guess the text they have used doesn’t belong to anyone specific.
Funny old world the web these days. A few years ago we were told you couldn’t run a site off ad revenue alone, and now some ‘enterprising’ individuals basically make a living delivering nothing of value with advertising thrown in.
Quiet around here …
Normally when I stop writing blog posts, it’s because I’m going through a low period emotionally. It’s been quiet around here for a while and although some of that is absolutely related to my mood, a greater part of it is because I’m just busier than I have been for a while in the evenings.
Three trips to the gym a week might not sound like much, but we’re there for 2 to 2 and a half hours, so during the week that eats up virtually all of the evening. When we get back we’ve got to eat, and then we’ve got to catch up on TV. On the days we’re not at the gym we’ve either been playing Lord of the Rings Online more often again, or we’re recovering from the gym and catching up on TV!
On top of that, in the last few weeks we’ve had a lot of people visiting, family and friends, and that takes up time and emotional energy. So it’s been a bit sparse around here other than gym updates.
I’m not sure if that will change any time soon, we’ve got visitors this weekend, we’ve had a lot of stress about cars and the house, and I’m in a pretty low place mood wise, but let’s see what happens.
Untidy Blog
Meh, transferred (or half transferred) various blog posts, forum posts and stuff from various sources to here, before I shut down some other websites I host, but as usual, got bored half way through so now I have a bunch of old, badly tagged, wrongly formatted stuff hanging around. To make it worse, I’m not sure how far through the process I got, so there may be only half the posts I want to transfer but no easy way to find them amongst the 1386 (soon to be 1397 when I hit post) items on the blog.
Oh well, must devote some of my impending holiday to sorting this place out (in lieu of sorting anything in the meatverse out).
Old logo!
Hah! I even found my old logo.
Orange!
After a few terrible personal websites, I finally put together a kind of blog a few years back and it was orange on black! I feel like I’ve come home!
Change of theme
I’m playing with new themes, will probably settle on Suffusion which will mean a change of header images (they’re wider). Until then, expect the header images to be broken or missing entirely!