blogging

Answering the blog questions challenge

by

Whilst I wasn’t tagged, I saw Matt Haughey’s ‘Answering the blog questions challenge‘ and decided to give it a go. It’s been a while since I did one of these.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I started blogging in 2002 as I could see people that I followed also starting to write blogs. I used to read Chris Pirillo‘s Lockergnome email newsletters, and saw that he and his then wife had both started blogs. Whilst I had run various web sites on Geocities and the like, having a blog that was easy to update quickly seemed like a good idea.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

Like most of the blogiverse, I use WordPress. In my case, it’s the open source self-hosted version, running on a virtual server that a third party hosts for me. It’s the most popular platform and highly customisable, with many plugins and themes available and lots of guides for how to do things. For now, it continues to suit my needs.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Yes. I started on Blogger, using some free hosting – I started blogging at age 17 when I didn’t have a bank account or was allowed to sign contracts for hosting. Within 9 months I’d switched to Movable Type, as I was 18 and could pay for things online myself.

I continued to use Movable Type until 2011, when I switched to a fork called Melody. However, Melody never really took off, and so I moved to WordPress the same year. I’ve used it ever since.

On other blogs, I’ve used ExpressionEngine before, and my final year project for my Computing degree in 2005 was to write a simple blogging system in Perl and PHP, to compare the two.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Just using the standard WordPress web interface. Years ago, I used w.bloggar, a Windows app which is still available on GitHub and is now open source. I have the WordPress app on my phone but mostly just use this to upload images.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Most of my writing is done at weekends – this is being written on Saturday evening. During the week, I don’t really have the time, but if I’m sufficiently inspired then I may write the occasional post on my lunch break from work. Generally though, I write the blog posts for the forthcoming week at the weekend. If I know I’m going to be busy then I’ll try to write more in advance.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

It’s rare that a blog post will go live on the same day that it’s written. Generally, I write in bulk and then schedule the posts to go live every other day throughout the forthcoming week. However, if something urgent comes up, I may shift things around.

I don’t have any drafts saved – generally, I write and then schedule each blog post in one session. Of course, I have the opportunity to tinker with each post before it goes live. I also have a note in Simplenote with blog post ideas, but these are usually single bullet points.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

I like to share interesting places that we’ve been, and, if I’ve recently solved a problem, writing about how I solved it. I also write quite a bit about home automation and occasionally about transport.

Who are you writing for?

I know there are a few regular readers, but also for myself – on more than one occasion, I’ve followed my own guide to solving a problem when it has happened again.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I remember A new dawn for trains in the North taking quite some time to write, as did Is the Waterloo & City Line Step Free? It’s Complicated. Both required some research and I’d consider them to be almost journalism.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Just to keep it going. I may change the theme at some point but only to another simple and lightweight one. I quite like the fact that it’s quick to load.

I imagine I will stick with WordPress for the foreseeable future, unless a better fork comes along.

Who else do you want to tag?

I’ll tag Kevin and Dave2, since I read their blogs and I’m pretty sure they read mine too.

As I was writing this, I saw that Ben Tasker had done so too. Ben notably uses a static site generator called Nikola for his blog, rather a dynamic system like WordPress.

23rd blogiversary

by

Good grief, has it really been 23 years since my first blog post? Apparently so.

Whilst I took a break between 2018 and 2022, that’s a very big commitment to something. Certainly, many, many hours have gone into writing blog posts over the years, and many more hours in maintaining a web site to host them on. I’ve always self-hosted my blog, even in the very early days when I wrote blog posts using Blogger. Last year’s blogiversary post goes into more detail about the technical side of things.

Thinking back to when I was turning 23, I was starting full-time work and about to move in with my then-girlfriend Hari. I was still renting a house, didn’t drive, wasn’t married and didn’t have children, but was still an independent adult. And, no-one likes you when you’re twenty three.

Considering that the blog was something that I started on a whim aged 17, whilst living with my parents and preparing for my A-level exams, part of me is genuinely surprised I’ve kept it for so long.

Bringing back more blog posts from the archives

by
An AI generated image of a phoenix rising from the flames of a browser window

Over the Christmas break, I spent quite a lot of my time off work going through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to bring back more old posts. I started this in November 2023, after deciding that I would bring back more popular or interesting posts.

I’m not going to link to every single post that I’ve reinstated, because that would take forever. Indeed, so far, I’ve reinstated 445 old blog posts, compared to the 242 new posts that I’ve written since I restarted blogging in 2022 (including this one). My main starting point has been my year in review posts (see 2024 in review as an example) where I have gone through and reinstated most of the blog posts linked from each of these reviews, going back to 2009.

It’s been a big job; I reinstated 78 blog posts from 2014 alone. My focus now is on blog posts from 2008 and earlier, my aim being to have at least one blog post from each month reinstated going back to when I started in 2002.

Reinstating blog posts isn’t a simple copy and paste job. For each one that I’m bringing back, I am:

  • Making sure any links still work (and leaving them pointing at the Wayback Machine if they don’t).
  • Re-adding images – many of these are just links to Flickr, but some need uploading again.
  • Checking spelling and grammar, because I’ve found lots of mistakes that I’d never previously spotted.
  • Reinstating any other missing blog posts that are linked, if needed.
  • Checking and adding tags – older blog posts especially did not have tags, or only had one or two.
  • Any blog posts from before I switched to WordPress in 2011 also need re-formatting.

It’s also worth noting that some blog posts were not individually indexed by the Wayback Machine, and so I have to try to find them in other ways, such as checking older versions of the home page.

My original aim was to reinstate between 1 and 2% of my old blog posts, and at present, I’m on around 1.5%. The quality definitely declines as time goes on; in the early days (mainly before Twitter), many blog posts would be one or two sentences at most but with several posts in a day. I’ll bring some of these back, but there are also good reasons why I won’t be reinstating everything. You can find these in my Finding peace post from October 2023.

If you want to take a look back at my old posts, I’ve reinstated the Archives page, which lists every single blog post split by year. This is generated using the Simple Yearly Archive plugin for WordPress.

The Birthday Gift of Blogging

by
An AI-generated image of a blog post popping out of a gift box whilst a crowd of people look on in awe

You may have heard of Matt Mullenweg – he co-founded WordPress, and is now the CEO of Automattic, which owns WordPress.com and contributes to WordPress.org (the downloadable version that you install on your own server, like I do).

Matt, like me, is turning 40 this year. And, as a ‘birthday gift’, he has asked people to blog. About anything.

Having only recently returned to blogging regularly, I’m starting to enjoy it again. With the rise of the Fediverse, the web is starting to feel like it did again in blogging’s heyday in the mid-2000s. Whilst some people used centralised sites like Blogger and TypePad back then, you could use tools like WordPress and Movable Type to run your own blog on your own server, and still interact with everyone else. And then the closed gardens of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like came along, and you had to be on those platforms to interact with other users.

Anil Dash has written a piece for Rolling Stone magazine called ‘The Internet is About to Get Weird Again’. And I think he’s right; there’s growing dissatisfaction with these big centralised services and how they hoover up so much personal data to sell to advertisers. Meta’s Threads is dipping its toes into the Fediverse, which would mean that Threads and Mastodon users can follow and interact with each other in a way that hasn’t been possible before. And if it works for Threads, could we see Instagram joining the Fediverse, to connect with PixelFed and maybe even Flickr?

Anil has some further reflections on his own blog. I’m hesitant to say that ‘blogging is back’; after all, there are so many other places that we can share short thoughts where there are audiences. But I feel like it’s having a bit of a renaissance, and in an age where there’s so much AI generated waffle filling up our search engine results, being able to interact with other humans has never been more important. It was what the web was designed for, after all.

So, happy birthday to Matt – and here is your gift from me. I hope that many others will do the same.

Comment Spam strikes back

by
An illustration of a robot turning web pages into canned meat product. Generated using Bing AI Image Generator

So now that I’m blogging again, it’s the return of comment spam on my blog posts.

Comment spam has always been a problem with blogs – ever since blogs first allowed comments, spam has followed. Despite the advert of the rel=”nofollow” link attribute, automated bots still crawl web sites and submit comments with links in the hope that this will boost the rankings in search engines.

In the early days of blogging, blogs often appeared high in Google’s search engine results – by their very nature, they featured lots of links, were updated frequently, and the blogging tools of the time often produced simple HTML which was easily parsed by crawlers. So it was only natural that those wanting to manipulate search engine rankings would try to take advantage of this.

I’ve always used Akismet for spam protection, even before I switched to WordPress, and it does a pretty good job. Even then, I currently have all comments set to be manually approved by me, and last week a few got through Akismet that I had to manually junk.

Humans, or AI?

These five interested me because they were more than just the usual generic platitudes about this being a ‘great post’ and ‘taught me so much about this topic’. They were all questions about the topic of the blog post in question, with unique names. However, as they all came through together, and had the same link in them, it was clear that they were spam – advertising a university in Indonesia, as it happens.

Had it not been for the prominent spam link and the fact they all came in together, I may have not picked up on them being spam. Either they were actually written by a human, or someone is harnessing an AI to write comment spam posts now. If it’s the latter, then I wonder how much that’s costing. As many will know already, AI requires a huge amount of processing power and whilst some services are offering free and low cost tools, I can’t see this lasting much longer as the costs add up. But it could also just be someone being paid using services like Amazon Mechanical Turk, even though such tasks are almost certainly against their terms of service.

I think I’m a little frustrated that comment spam is still a problem even after a few years’ break from blogging. But then email spam is a problem that we still haven’t got a fix for, despite tools like SPF, DKIM and DMARC. I’m guessing people still do it because, in some small way, it does work?

Bringing back the archives

by
An illustration of a phoenix rising from the ashes, with a web page. Generated by the Bing AI Image Creator

Last month, I wrote about how I had found peace with myself regarding losing over a decade’s worth of blog posts.

Well, I’ve already sort-of changed my mind. I have already brought back some old posts which, until now, were only accessible on the Web Archive Wayback Machine.

This doesn’t mean that all of my old posts will be reinstated – if anything, I’ll be bringing back 1-2% of them at most. My criteria are:

  • Posts which, despite being offline for about 5 years, are still linked to. I’m using the Redirection WordPress plugin to track 404 errors, which you can group by URL to see the most commonly not-found pages.
  • Posts that still offer useful advice, or information that is otherwise not easily accessible on other web sites.
  • Posts that mark important events in my life.

So, here’s a selection of what I’ve brought back already, in chronological order:

  • Media Player Classic (January 2004). A review of a now-defunct lightweight alternative media player for Windows. VLC is probably a better option nowadays.
  • Apple Lossless Encoder (May 2004). A blog post about Apple’s then-new music format which preserves full audio quality when ripping CDs in iTunes, and how it compares to other formats like FLAC and Monkey’s Audio.
  • Knock-off Nigel (August 2008). An anti-piracy advert for TV.
  • How to migrate a Parallels virtual machine to VirtualBox (November 2008). A how-to guide for switching from Parallels Desktop to VirtualBox, which I imagine is still useful for some people.
  • Fixing high memory usage caused by mds (February 2013). A how-to guide for fixing an issue with MacOS. I don’t use a Mac anymore but hopefully this is still useful to someone.
  • Baby update (November 2015). This was actually a draft version of a post that must have somehow survived in Firefox’s local storage, so I re-published it.
  • How to: fix wrong location on iPhone (January 2017). Another how-to guide that fixed an issue I was having at the time with my iPhone’s location randomly jumping around.

There’s more to come, as and when I find time to restore them. I’m also using Google Search Console to find pages that it’s expecting to work, but that result in a 404 error.

Finding peace

by
A photo of a rubbish bin at the now-demolished Bolton West Services on the M61. It says 'Litter P eas'.

There are some of you who have been subscribed to this blog’s feed for many, many years. I started writing a blog way back in 2002 – back when Web 2.0 was just starting to become a thing – and kept it going for almost 20 years.

And then a botched server upgrade resulted in everything being wiped, including my backups.

It had been my intention to try and salvage what I could; after all, many of my old blog posts should be in the Web Archive, and in other places across the internet too. But working full-time and being a dad just doesn’t leave much spare time, and I tend to prefer to use my free time to consume media (mostly reading) rather than producing new blog posts, or, more pertinently, bringing back old ones.

But it isn’t just a time issue. If I ended up taking a sabbatical from work, or parental leave, then I still wouldn’t go back to re-fill this blog’s arhcives. I’ve made a decision that what happened has happened, and I’m drawing a line under it.

There were some good blog posts over the years, that generated a lot of comments and links at the time. Others highlighted key points in my life; graduating university, relationship milestones, becoming a father and so on. But, my reasons for not undertaking blog archaeology are as follows:

I don’t stand by some of the things I wrote

I wrote more than one post about enjoying the DVDs of various sitcoms written by a well-known comedy writer in the 1990s and 2000s. Unfortunately, said comedy writer, who I am not going to name, is now a major figure in the pushback against rights for trans* people in the UK, and as a member of the LGBTQ+ community myself, I can’t support that. This is just one example, but my opinions have changed over the years, and I don’t really want to go back and revisit what I’ve written on some topics. Especially things like my changing relationship with Apple products, and politics.

It’s worth noting that, when I started my blog in 2002, I was only 17 – I’m now fast approaching my forties, and with that comes more wisdom and knowledge of how the world works, and being aware of my priviledges as a white, middle class cisgendered male person.

I also don’t think that people really want to read about how much alcohol I was drinking in my early years at university, or the regular apologies for not blogging as often as I thought I should.

There are things I wrote about that I don’t want in the public domain anymore

Being a parent and the responsibilities it brings changes you as a person – just ask a neuroscientist. Early on, I talked about and shared photos of our child in a way that I wouldn’t do now; nowadays, I try to keep much of their identity off the internet – including their name and gender. They haven’t consented to that information being out there, and are too young to understand the implications of consent. And I wouldn’t want them to read things written about them when they’re older that might upset them.

In my previous relationship, between 2005 and 2009, we agreed that I would only use a pseudonym when talking about my partner, and though we separated nearly 15 years ago, I still consider myself bound by the conditional consent that we agreed at the time. Maybe when our child is older, we could agree something similar.

Some stuff is really out of date

Early on, I tracked the development of the development of the web browser that would become Mozilla Firefox, and blogged about the changes in each beta release in great detail, up to the release of version 1.0 in 2004. But after almost 20 years, so much has changed; the screenshots I took are probably all gone too, and so I don’t think there’s a lot to be gained by bringing those old posts back.

Because I’ve always had an interest in technology, there are many old posts that I’ve written that are outdated. I’m sure some contain advice which, if followed today, would be actively detrimental rather than helpful.

Perhaps, if I somehow managed to get the time and resources to bring back the really good posts, it would be worthwhile. But there would be a lot of poor quality content to sift through, and I certainly wouldn’t want to bring anything back without reading it first.

Seeing as how the likelihood of me having that time is low, then I have had to make peace with the fact that all that content is going to have to remain scattered to the digital winds of the internet. And that’s okay.

An update (January 2024)

Okay so I’ve already gone back on my word and started bringing back some old posts. My aim is to re-instate blog posts that are still getting traffic – I’m tracking dead links in WordPress and Google Site Console, and if they’re linking to things that still have value, I’ll re-instate them. I’m also aiming to have at least one post from each month, going back to January 2002. Overall, I may bring back about 1-2% of what was here before.

What’s this? A blog post?

by

Well, hello. This is my first blog post in almost four years.

I last wrote a post on here in September 2018, and then took an un-planned break from blogging. This was exacerbated at the end of 2018, when I attempted to upgrade the server that this web site runs on, and ended up wiping everything. And I mean, everything, including the backups that I thought I’d saved elsewhere but hadn’t.

Just like that, 16 and a half years of blog posts were gone, along with all the comments. Now, it’s possible that I could have re-built most of the blog posts, using things like the Web Archive and help from others, but between working full-time and being a parent, I just didn’t have the time or the inclination to do so.

Furthermore, I was beginning to become uncomfortable with how much I had shared about my life over the years. Back when I started the blog, aged 17, I had a tendency to over-share. Over time I reigned that in; I was in a relationship with someone between 2005 and 2009 where I agreed not to share her real name on here, and though we’ve both moved on I’m keeping that commitment – not least because we’re still in touch and actually met up recently.

But I also wanted to reign in how much I talk about my child, who is now six. I’m happy to share their age, but I’m afraid you won’t be knowing their name or seeing recent photos, and I’m even keeping their gender off here now too. It’s about consent and privacy – as a parent, I want to protect my child, and they’re too young to really know what a blog is, never mind have lots of information about their life made public.

I am hoping to get back into the habit of blogging regularly, though not on a daily basis as I had aimed for in the past. Initially I’m aiming for twice a week, as there are four years of news to catch up on, but my minimum aspiration is for one new blog post per week.

Why now? Well, I’ve wanted to get back into writing for pleasure again. I’ve written a few things on Medium, but it feels like writing for a magazine; I’d rather stick to somewhere more personal that’s just about and run by me. I feel like I have things to say now, and hopefully the time to put those things into written words.

If you’re an old-time reader of my blog, welcome back, and I hope that this wasn’t too much of a surprise when it popped up in your RSS reader. And if you’re a new reader, hello. You can read my very dry ‘about me‘ page which is more focussed on my work, but I hope you’ll stick around and will get to know me better.

14 years of blogging

by

Today marks 14 years since my first blog post. No, I can’t quite believe it either.

Considering all of the things that have happened in my life over the past 14 years, I’m pleased with myself for finding the time to keep the blog going, even if I do go through periods of not writing anything for a while. I’m hoping to be able to continue for some years to come.

I’ll save the big retrospective for next year, when hopefully I’ll be celebrating 15 years.

On blogging something every day

by
Siemens Desiro 380007

Today marks the 30th successive day that I have posted a blog entry. This used to be something that I could do with no effort – in fact, go back to 2002-2004 and I was often blogging several times a day. Nowadays, it requires much more effort.

Back then, there was no Twitter or Facebook. Consequently some of the posts I made were merely a couple of sentences – maybe a very brief commentary on an interesting link. Those sorts of things now go on Twitter or Delicious, with the subsequent digest of links being auto-posted on Saturday mornings. Unless I can come up with a few paragraphs of thought, I tend not to bother with blogging about one particular news item.

Plus I have less time to write blog posts these days. Back when I was at university, I had enough breaks during the day to post regularly. Now that I work full time, I only have lunch breaks, evenings and weekends to blog. Generally, I will write several entries in one go, and then schedule them to be posted on each subsequent day (I actually wrote this on Sunday afternoon, for example). Whilst I have managed to produce something every day recently, it hasn’t been easy and I respect those people like Dave2 who are still able to produce substantial blog posts every day, year in, year out.

I’m going to try to keep on with posting something every day for as long as I can. It isn’t easy, but hopefully keeping it as a habit will help, and you can also support me by commenting on posts to show that what I write is worthwhile.