After an abortive attempt to relaunch last year, I finally locked myself into an apartment and didn’t let myself out until I had it more or less done this time. There are still a few things to do (more technical details for those interested, below), such as paginate the stream of posts - at the moment it’s just one long list, and crucially, add comments - my technical demands mean I can’t just go for the easy option, so those will have to wait. If you have a burning need to comment on something either send me a message via the contact form or contact me on Twitter or one of the other social networks listed at the bottom left of this page. The RSS feed is also not working, it was but now it’s broken again, and I promise to make it a priority to fix it for those who prefer to use a feed reader (I am also one of those people so I understand).
I hope I can help you navigate these strange times as I learn to surf them myself. They must be strange because I just got an irresistible craving to listen to Rush again for the first time in about 25 years! So here I am typing this, listening to Xanadu from ‘A Farewell To Kings’, and pretty fantastic it is too…
“A thousand years have come and gone…”
Technical details for those interested: the blog has been created using Stackbit which is a super-cool web app, letting you choose between several static site generators, and a CMS to host them, and giving you nice themes to boot. So I chose to host Hugo on Netlify with the Fjord theme. That is only the start of the tinkering, because I had to import all the posts from the old WordPress blog (still existing on 2018.guyjames.com) and convert them to Hugo format, for which I used a script I found on Github (I think), which worked very well. As I have maintained a version of the old blog as a sort of museum piece, I have decided to strip out a lot of the old ‘Asides’, which were the equivalent of tweets, just short posts mostly consisting of quotes from other people. If anyone is interested they can go to the old blog to see them. I also had to find images for some of the posts which I felt deserved them, which took a while. The images in the sidebar of myself will probably change from time to time as I find better ones. My motto for the past few years has been ‘done is better than perfect’, well this is neither done nor perfect, but I tempt myself with thinking that it is at least on the way to the first of those, with the proviso that everything that is alive is at least somewhat a work in progress, and I hope it is at least alive, and that you enjoy it.
Photo by Huỳnh Đạt from Pexels