Blogging

Coronavirus playlist

• Safe European Home - The Clash
• My Corona - The Knack
• Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex
• Don’t Stand So Close To Me - The Police
• Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons
• Ghost Town - The Specials
• Clampdown - The Clash
• You’re A Germ - Wolf Alice
• Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall
• All By Myself - Eric Carmen
• Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground
• Paranoid - Black Sabbath
• Panic - The Smiths
• I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs
• Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols
• It’s The End of The World (as we know it) - R.E.M.

why I dislike the popular TV quiz show - Tipping Point

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it’s partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure.

One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:-

‘Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?’

‘Carbon dioxide’

I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with ‘Carbon’ which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon. Then she added two atoms of oxygen for good measure.

the curious case of the filling station incident

7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it’s New Year’s Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle.

There’s just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he’s asked for his registration. He can’t remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it’s an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate. No problem. Then he’s asked for his mileage which he doesn’t know. This is optional so no problem.

Another blog migration

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder

https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418

Writing tools.

1. Emacs
2. Wiki What about you?

I spontaneously replied.

Emacs Orgmode Nikola

This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully.

Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version [8.0.1] Nikola-8 and I was on the previous version - 7.8.15. I quickly created a Python 3 virtual environment and installed Nikola.

Code highlight example

This is the famous ‘Hello world’ program written in Python in colour using Markdown.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import sys

def hello(name='world'):
    greeting = "hello " + name
    print(greeting)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    hello(*sys.argv[1:])

This took me a long time to get working.

from GitHub pages to Amazon S3

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll.

I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3. As you are charged for upload/download traffic, an intelligent sync process (rather than uploading everything) for deployment is important.

Welcome

Welcome…to the atrocity exhibition.

Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

20 questions

‘Is she a werewolf ?

‘No’.

‘Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’

‘No’.

‘Is she a robot ?’

‘No’.

‘Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’

‘No’

‘Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?’

Octopress versus Drupal performance

One of the main advantages of a statically generated blog (like Octopress) over a blogging platform that uses a database (WordPress, Drupal) is performance.

My humble blog doesn’t get enough traffic for performance to be a consideration and I thought I wouldn’t be able to discern any improvement.

This graph is from Google Webmaster Tools. Can you guess when the blog migration from Drupal to Octopress was done ? Yes - that’s right - the middle of September (17th to be precise).

Diamond Geezer's audience

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list.

I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results:

• Blogger 60
• WordPress.com 11
• WordPress.org 11
• Typepad 4
• MovableType 3
• Livejournal 2
• Canalblog 1
• Drupal 1
• ExpressionEngine 1
• Nucleus CMS 1
• Serendipity 1
• Guardian (journo) 1
• Custom 1

The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn’t surprise me that much. I have noticed before that it’s very popular amongst UK bloggers; particularly veteran bloggers who maybe had less choice available that the plethora of options available today.