House Keeping To keep things tidy I have added a new section to the blog. The old posts are in the posts archive section and the current blog posts are in the blogs folder. This is to spend less time scrolling up and down the lists of posts. I am still thinking about how best to organise things on this static part of the website.
Three years ago I stopped using Instagram because I was tired of seeing influencers and adverts rather than by the people I chose to follow. The cherry on the cake, that pushed me to dump Instagram is when they changed the location of the Post button from the left corner to the top right and changed the default from photo to story.
For ten years or more I used instagram and shared photos, and I enjoyed capturing at least an image or two every single day.
In theory WordPress is a fantastic tool to write a blog, without needing to learn to code. In practice I am tired of WordPress and I have been tired of WordPress ever since they started to use blocks, and ever since I noticed that it uses React. React and Meta
I know that PHP was developed by Facebook, and that we use it all the time, but I also know that React was developed by Facebook as it was morphing into Meta, the destroyer of the independent web.
When looking at Codeberg as a European alternative to github I came across mentions of Pelican, a static blog generator. Yesterday I spent several hours setting it up and playing. Whilst playing with it I saw some opportunities. By default Pelican is designed to have one category per blog post. For small websites this is fine. It encourages people to focus on three to five topics, and ensure that each topic is clearly visible in the nav bar at the top of the page.
With the decline in the value of social media so the value of blogging has come back up. By blogging, rather than using social media, for at least an hour or two I am forcing myself to think, and to elaborate on ideas that would otherwise go without conclusion. Having a thought that is shared in 140 characters is easy. Having a thought that is three hundred words long is not.
Most websites are simple. They have five to ten pages at most but usually a single page is enough. Most pages are about one specific thing, whether it’s a CV inspired page to find new clients or a simple page with a few products. Most are usually about a single topic.
This makes website maintenance and design simple, because one theme fits every page. My website is different. It has articles about the Romans, Geography, Environmental Studies, old student newspaper articles, Media studies pages and more.
Learning and Consolidation are important to me. Over a year ago I wanted to learn Laravel and Angular but when I started to study them I felt lost. I felt that I didn’t understand the topics well enough. I went back to the basics. I followed several courses about JavaScript and how it works. I typed out all of the lesson codes, and debugged it until it worked. Some bugs took three or four hours to fix, but eventually I got there
I love using Atom because it’s light and fast, even on a six year old machine like mine. Github is soon going to archive atom. I will lose my favourite editor. That’s why I played with VS Code, Sublime Text and other solutions. Vim is the winner for now.
Vim is on every linux and mac machine, and can be installed on Windows. Out of the box Vim is a really simple, limited editor but if you invest the time, to find plugins, and learn how to use it then it becomes a great application.
Today I used Laravel to code a Twitter clone called Chirper via the tutorial you can find here. The tutorial took about two hours before I got the notifications section of the tutorial. The tutorial is easy to follow and with my contextual knowledge I was able to write most of the code with a minimum of errors. The tutorial follows the CRUD model, Create, read, update delete, and adds in notifications for good measure.
Today I started to follow a course where someone turns a static html page into a Laravel blog. I experimented with home.blade and one or two other features and I got two pages to load, and the login to work, without more than that.
What makes today’s learning and experimenting interesting is that the time I spent creating PHP arrays for my website content is now easy to transfer to json files for use with dynamic websites.