Yesterday I talked about feeds not being incomplete and how it was a shame that we could not read the article unless we had a connection to the sites in question. Desertrose0601 on twitter pointed out in a blog comment that I was guilty of the same thing that I was commenting on. That has since been resolved.
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. Instagram and Whatsapp were destroyed by Facebook, as the monopolist took over those accounts.
Blocks and ClassicPress
I am not alone to feel this way. I see that there is the ClassicPress community. I tried ClassicPress and it works, but it feels like time could be better spent with a different project, that diverges, and has a more concrete direction than “We don’t like blocks”. I am oversimplifying. I realise it’s more than that.
Hugo
After playing with Hugo for a week or two I think that this would be a very nice solution. I don’t need comments, and I don’t need a complicated backend for the type of blogging I do. I believe that Hugo would easily fill the gap left behind by WordPress.
Dormant WordPress
If and when I do make this change I won’t convert my WordPress blog to Hugo. I would simply create a new directory and write blog posts that would go there. I am still not certain of my strategy. For now the goal is to have my static website running Hugo cleanly, before then adding the blogging section. Within the next week I should be ready to make the leap.
And Finally
Before WordPress I tried plenty of different content management tools and services, as can be seen in the wayback machine. I am migrating, primarily because I want to try something new. I want to learn how to use a new tool and expand my skills, rather than have them plateau. The reason for the switch can be described in a single word. Curiousity. I am curious to see how I can use this “new” tool, to blog, with a different workflow.
For three hundred and sixty six days I have written a blog post daily. In some cases I wrote two posts, and scheduled the post to appear the next day. This is when I was driving for thirteen hours, or if I knew that my morning was busy. In the process I have definitely given myself a writing habit. The question I ask myself now is whether to continue, or whether to change the posting frequency.
One of the problems with posting daily is that we sometimes have nothing to say. We sit at the computer and try to find inspiration for an hour, or two, or even three. Eventually we write but is there any value in what we wrote? According to the viewer stats there isn’t. It’s a matter of just writing, for the sake of habit, and experience. It also demonstrates that I have the stamina to write every single day, even if some days are more interesting than others.
I’m thinking about reducing my writing frequency to once every two days, or once per week. If I write once per week then I might be as uninspired when I write daily, but weekly. In effect I’d be lazier, less disciplined, than I am at the moment. I don’t think that reducing the frequency of writing would be productive, because that would be about laziness, rather than striving.
Writing daily, despite having nothing to say is about consistency. A toddler falls up to several hundred times in a single day when learning to walk. An adult walks 23,000 steps without even noticing, in a single day, when hiking. Writing daily might generate a lot of crap, but it also trains us to write, to type, to think, to go back and edit. It trains us to put ideas into writing. We learn to write every single day.
One of the reasons I decided to blog daily, is that I saw that Facebook and Instagram were making money from the time I spent on their sites and I thought “I should invest that time into my own site”. I did. That’s why I now blog daily, and I’ve had the habit for three hundred and sixty six days in a row. I do feel like changing the rules for myself.
At the moment I post written blog posts, but now that I have written blog posts for three hundred and sixty six days I could change it up. On some das I could post a video, and on others I could post photographs. The point of a photograph is that I could spend 30 seconds on a blog post, rather than one to three hours per day. I proved that I could write daily for an entire year. Now I can reward myself, by changing the rules.
Two days ago I ran by a road that became a river, and I should have stopped to take photos or video. If I had then I could show just how heavy the rain had been, over a period of hours and days. High winds are forecast overnight. It could be fun to capture the waves crashing on shore. If the temperature dropped then it could be fun to capture the ice formation.
With the change in format I hope to spend less time on blogging. I want to continue blogging but I want to give myself to post an image, rather than write. Writing takes time.
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.
Although three hundred words doesn’t sound like much, and takes a few seconds to skim through it can take an hour or two to write. Today I wrote about chatGPT and why I didn’t like this move, but decided to leave that post as a draft, rather than publish it. I want blog posts to be positive, when possible.
The issue with social media, in recent years, is that it has forgotten that it should be about individuals and communities, rather than advertisers. If individuals and communities are scuppered by the social media giants then it makes sense to return to the metaphorical village of personal blogs and websites.
Now that social media has become a waste of time I enjoy investing that time in blogging. For an hour or two I spend time thinking, elaborating ideas and then writing a blog post. Most of these posts are never read. Blogging isn’t about being seen or read. I think blogging is akin to mindfulness or meditation.
I use meditate in the French sense of the word, deep thinking, or to prepare something after a lot of thought. Blogging is the result of reflection, although it might not feel like it, when read. Blogging is a break from the world, to elaborate an idea, before posting it and forgetting about it.
Most blog posts are not read. I’m developing a writing habit, and my writing skills, in a public place that no one visits.
I have been following courses for three years now. Within the last week or two I decided to start experimenting with PHP using my website as a guinea pig. I have already converted a few pages to PHP. Some of them use for each loops and others use the include functionality. My aim is to practice the skills that I have studied, within a production environment.
Some of the tasks are repetitive. This isn’t a bad thing. It builds habit and understanding. By doing something frequently enough the pattern gets burned into my subconscious. When that’s done I will spot errors automatically, and if I get an error message I will know what it means.
One error message I got was $article was not found and after seeing it three or four times, I know to check that I have included the array data php file. Problem fixed, time to move on to the next page.
What I enjoy about PHP so far is that it’s intuitive. Error messages are from the line beneath the line where the error is. This means that bugs are fixed within seconds not minutes.
Another aspect that I really appreciate about foreach loops is that they’re direct. With Javascript you need to understand the DOM, parent elements, children etc to get things to work. With PHP, so far, I work directly with the elements that I’m manipulating.
If I tried to do my instagram clone now I would find it much easier to do. I progressed.
Looking forward learning to use PHP directly, means that when I use WordPress, Laravel and other solutions I will understand what I am doing, and what is going wrong, if things do not work.
For now I am happy to rework my website. I will practice new skills. The website will benefit.
There are four reasons to be happy today. The first of these is that my MBP is finally in Geneva therefore it is a short matter of days before I get it into my hands and start playing with the computer and the new software.
The laptop will be used for all video editing and multimedia work I have whilst the iBook will be used for daily tasks such as surfing the web, mobility, and more. I’m going to have two apple laptops capable of video editing at my disposal which is quite a luxury.
The second reason I should be happy is that google Adsense, over the past week has doubled in income, meaning that I should get my next check twice as fast as the last one. I added a few more AdSense adverts on sections where advertising had not been and as a result, many more eyes are seeing and clicking on the advert. I’m still a long way from earning enough money to live off my website but any income is good.
The third reason is that my website is being migrated to Drupal, a database-driven CMS solution for web mastering rather than the outdated HTML pages that it has been over the past decade.
The advantage of the Content Management System (CMS) is that the layout is the same for every page whilst the content is held within a database. As a result, when you want to change something on multiple pages all you need to do is move blocks around. Blocks, when applied to drupal are how modules are manipulated to space them in specific areas on the website. As a result, whenever a website is re-worked it takes a matter of minutes rather than hours to change.
As a side note, I’ve also updated both the PHP and MySQL database to version 5 and it’s working smoothly for the time being.
The final reason to be happy is that a friend has received the edited DVD that I worked on a few weeks ago and finalised within the past few days. As a result, I’ve managed to finish what I had to do a matter of days rather than hours before it was due.
It’s easy to use Facebook or other CMS every day without thinking about how the code works. This summer I have coded two CMS using Linkedin Learning. One of these CMS was running with PHP and MySQL and the other was running with Ruby On Rails and MySQL.
In the process I learned how to install MySQL, how to get MySQL and PHP to talk to each other. How to organise files between private and public folders on a web server and more. Getting MySQL to talk with the web server was a challenge that took a few days to get right.
With the PHP CMS I learned about arrays, about interacting between PHP and MySQL and I learned to be attentive to using the correct syntax. Sometimes though, a single typo would block my progress for a period of time. It wasn’t rare for me to compare the code I wrote with the code written by the instructor line by line to find my typos.
I could have cut and pasted the code but I found that simply typing the code character by character was enough to force me to read the code carefully. When I made typos it taught me to attentive to details as well as to be more aware of the syntax.
Ruby on Rails was an interesting learning challenge. I got stuck before I even finished setting up the project. As a result of this I went back and followed a course on essential Ruby. This worked as a nice complement to what I learned from that point on.
During the project configuration process I got stuck because I created the project with the wrong database connection type. I left it on the default and when I tried to correct this I failed, and failed, and failed again. Eventually I decided to delete the application and create a new one, with the right database connection and this time it worked well.
The challenges I faced were that the Puma Server wouldn’t start because a gem was missing, that the CMS wouldn’t start because of a mistake in the routing file and more. Eventually I would restart the server but I spent a lot of time debugging.
One of the most persistant problems I had with Ruby on Rails is that it’s hundreds of lines of code across multiple files and although the error messages are obvious you need to learn to read them. For two or three days I couldn’t find what the error was, despite looking through every page and its code. Eventually I found that I had written “visible” and forgotten a “:visible”. That error crashed the Puma server consistently.
With Ruby On Rails, I learned to work within a framework. This knowledge is transferrable to working with other frameworks. I’ve gone from knowing how to install and use a CMS like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal to learning how to create one and to understand how arrays and functions work. I have also learned how to think about security and how to use blowfish and other encryption technology to keep passwords etc. more secure.
With Ruby Gems I could work on projects of my own and be less reliant on other websites. One project I would like to work on is creating a heatmap of all my walking activities and the easiest way to do this would be to find some code and adapt it to have the functionality I desire.
The next step is to learn to use JavaScript. I will then know how to use HTML/PHP for content, CSS for layout and finally JS for interactivity.