Another year went by after me saying I was going to start blogging again, without me actually doing any blogging.
Tag Archives: blogging
Weird
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.
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.
Diabetes
I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2005. In the 12 years since we found the right level of medication, the metformin dose I’m on has never changed. Until today. Up from 1500mg a day to 2000mg a day, with a promise from me to the GP to also lose some weight with my intent being to reduce that dose again.
Ever since the accident last year, and to be fair, for a short while before it, my sugar has been creeping up and my HbA1c’s getting worse. I’ve had a couple of ‘soft’ attempts at getting it back under control, but not enough to offset the changes, and so it’s time for a bit of focus. I don’t want the change to be permanent, I want to be able to reverse it, and I’m going to try hard and delay the ‘inevitable’ slide towards insulin for as long as possible.
It remains to be seen whether my will power will be strong enough to actually lose weight, but I’m going to give it a shot.
I’m pleased the GP was once again willing to work with me, rather than simply sticking me on a new medication or insisting the change was larger and permanent.
Interesting, the only reason I know it was 2005 when I was diagnosed, is because I read back and found the blog posts where I started talking about it, which is a sign I guess that I should blog more often, not because anyone reads them, but just because writing this stuff down is useful for my own memory.
Excuse me …
You’ll need to excuse me while I fuck about with carefully experiment with various site themes.
Given up blogging?
Maybe not. Last few weeks I’ve had an itch forming to start writing blog posts again. Maybe I’m starting to finally recover from the crushing despair I felt in the job I left in June this year? Who knows.
Whatever the reasons, I’m definitely starting to feel more creative again and that inevitably leads to blog posts.
I didn’t think …
When I started writing the Fear of 4 Wheels blog posts, I really didn’t anticipate there being this many. I would have come up with a better numbering system than just ‘part 14’.
That is all.
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?
Windows Live Writer?
I tried playing with Windows Live Writer last year, but the download stalled and never fully installed, and I never got around to re-trying it later. I don’t really have any issue writing blog posts directly into WordPress, the GUI is pretty nice, but there are times when I want to write something complicated or long, make a lot of edits, bring in text from elsewhere etc. and it’s easier to do that outside the browser I find.
So this isn’t a very constructive post, just me playing with the tool. I’m am interested in the auto-linking feature, which hopefully has turned the first link in this post into a link to somewhere on the Microsoft site. That seems like a neat thing, and if I was blogging a bunch of related posts that might prove useful.
So far, I’m quite liking the simple interface – when Microsoft gets applications right, they can be quite good (is that a tautology?)