Preparing to move from WordPress to Zola

In Feb 2021 I said I was planning on moving from WordPress to Zola. I am still not done. Eking the work out really hasn’t worked. Who’d have thought?

If I didn’t care about maintaining URLs then I would probably be done by now, but I do because, y’know, I desperately want to be cool.

So, important URLs to maintain in priority order:

  1. Main entry point (/blog)
  2. Individual post entry URL (/blog/year/month/title)
  3. Feed URL (/blog/feed)
  4. Year URL (/blog/year/)
  5. Month URL(/blog/year/month)

Nice to have URLs:

  1. Tag URL (/blog/tag/tagname)

URLs I’m going to ignore:

  1. Category URLs (/blog/category/catname/) – I’ll merge this with tags
  2. All pagination URLs (blog/page/x/)

Of the URLs I want to keep only the feed URL looks impossible – I don’t think Zola can create a feed at two levels deep, which means I’ll need a rewrite, which needs I’ll need a host which supports rewrites which I thought meant I’d have to actually get a proper host (like Hetzner’s CAX11) but actually it looks like my plan of hosting on Cloudflare Pages is still good to go because they support redirects!

I’m using a custom plugin to get my content out of WordPress in the first place. I’ll write about that another time.

mdtable-pretty-printer is a plugin for Inkdrop

mdtable-pretty-printer is a plugin for Inkdrop which tidies markdown tables in your notes.

This is the first plugin I’ve written for Inkdrop, and was an interesting experience. Plugins are written in JavaScript, which I don’t write a lot of, and follow React-based patterns which I’m not very familiar with and I ended up having to revert my intended plugin structure (one file with the entrance point and the actual class doing the work in another) to just bundling everything in one file.

The markdown tidying is done by Ian McNaughton’s zero-dependency mdTablePrettyPrinter library, which worked great. It also powers his website https://www.mdtableprettyprinter.com/ which is what I’d been copy/pasting my tables into to tidy them previously.

I don’t recommend using my plugin, instead I recommend table-editor which is far more powerful and formats tables safely with fewer error edge cases than mine, and which I didn’t find until after I’d written my plugin!

Habit forming

Tom Scott has just finished ten years of his weekly Things You Might Not Know series on YouTube.

Simon Willison has written about streak-forming and not holding yourself too tightly to doing something every day – this is something I feel a great sympathy with; there is so much advice about doing something every day, and seeing the streak increase and using your unwillingness to break that streak to inspire you to continue.

This doesn’t work for me. Setting an extrinsic goal (increasing an external value) doesn’t work as well for me as competing with someone else – my intrinsic desire to keep up with or exceed someone else (in particular if I know them) doing something similar is a much stronger motivation.

This is because, as Simon says, life can just get in the way. If it’s an exercise streak and I’m ill for a few days, then I’ll miss my goals and away goes that streak. If it’s a blogging streak and my internet connection goes down on the day I need to make my post then away that goes too. 

The unpredictable impact of externalities can affect your goals too easily. This is disheartening and can lead to abandoning the goal altogether. Far better to build in a certain amount of slack into either your initial expectation or how the streak is being tracked. A lot of goal-tracking processes (and apps), in particular in New Year’s resolution season, don’t seem to take this into account.

I am trying to do more cycling this year; I was doing well last year but injured myself in September and completely fell off the wagon. So this year I’ll be tracking my progress in two ways. Firstly I’m competing with my wife who has also started an exercise programme (and neither of us wants to “lose” to the other – a highly effective motivation!) and secondly I’ve got a physical year-long tracker on the wall in my office where I’m tracking when I do and don’t get on my bike. I’m expecting that there will be full weeks of no cycling (when I’m on holiday and when I’m inevitably ill), but so long as I can keep more green than red across the full year, I’ll be happy. 

Hopefully this will prove to be a far healthier way of both staying on track, and being fair to myself, rather than focusing on simply incrementing a number.

Getting going with Gemini

I’ve been really interested in Gemini space for about a year now, having read the protocol and used a few web proxies to explore Gemini space

I finally went whole hog and downloaded a Gemini browser, Lagrange on my home computer in order to explore Gemini space better, faster and using the experience the actual Gemini users get. (Kudos to Lagrange for being a browser written in C which actually compiled first time when I wanted to make a small change!)

Gemini has been great!  

It’s incredible to find all these people publishing content on the internet which is totally invisible to the web. It’s been said many times before but it really does feel like the early days of blogging, where people are exploring the new formats, new types of engagement and ways of browsing, editing, uploading and exploring each other’s content.

The limitations of the format (no styles!) means there are some really interesting pieces of functionality in the client, like auto-selecting a colour palette based on the domain name, or adding in-page references or tables of contents as part of the native browser, rather than through a plugin. This works especially well in Gemini because there is no server-side layout to consider, so the browser is free to use the full width of its window to provide affordances in a consistent way across multiple sites.

Another of the really interesting aspects is Titan. This is an extension to the Gemini protocol which allows for editing and uploading of content in Gemini space, in a way much more similar to the original envisioning of the read/write web by Tim Berners-Lee back in the 90s. A good example of this is through using the Phoebe wiki software.

And so the question remains what best to do to join in with this fun?

Well, it turns out that it’s absolutely trivial to run a Gemini server on a Raspberry Pi, of which I have many in a box, and so I chose agate (download binary, execute binary), created some pages, added some firewall rules and lo! up and running!

So, plenty of playing to do now and to see if I can use some conversion tools (and editing discipline) to multi post both to here and its Gemini equivalent. Exciting!

When my bins go out

I had to write some PHP to tell me when to put out my bins because my council doesn’t follow their own rules for collections.

Every week my council organises the collection of our 5 bins – but there is a pattern to how they are collected.

This is a pretty simple pattern, with 3 of the bins going out every week and the two largest (general waste and garden waste) alternating each week.

Except that it’s not. 

What actually happens is that for the first three months the garden waste is collected in the first week and then for the second three months the black bins are collected first, and so on. Mostly this works out fine and it looks like the collections simply alternate each week. But August 2023 (which is in the middle of the third quarter of the year) had 5 weeks, meaning there should have been two weeks in a row where the general waste was not collected, and the garden waste was collected. This did not happen.

This means that the document they provide residents with dates of collections is now wrong. The PDF with this info is also wrong. The way to find out what’s being collected is to use their website. The website does everything using ajax and does not push state to the URL, and so the page with your individual information on it is not bookmarkable. This is annoying.

Luckily, watching the network requests revealed a very simple JSON file that covers the bin collection timing of my area and thus I could extract it trivially to provide the useful service that neither the council leaflet nor website provide.

Prefer planned rework to big bang delivery

We have a few large projects on at work to replace key legacy systems and are discussing how to do that.

Most of the discussions so far have tended to end up in a position where an incremental piece of delivery of the large overall system has been rejected because we know it will require rework later.

In this case, knowing about the rework is good!

For large projects which do not plan to deliver in an incremental way, the total amount of work required is unknown. It is in our interests to make as much of that work as known as possible as early as possible, but if a large system does not go into production until is fully complete, then the amount of bugs and rework to be done are both a) unknown in advance and b) time-critical. This is the worst of all worlds.

Far better is to incrementally deliver over an up-front longer timescale (you’re going to have a longer timescale than your big bang delivery plan accommodates anyway, you can just choose to ignore that fact by drawing a gantt chart of how many days a task 2 years from now will take) and know that what you’re delivering actually works, and that reworking it will be a time-bounded effort because you will have both the experience of doing the delivery and evidence of real-world usage and behaviours of your system.

Riding my bike online

I like riding my bicycle. I like being outside; I like getting exercise; I like that I can do it solo and leave all my daily concerns at home as I cycle on a dedicated paved path which winds its way between crop fields and over bridges.

Or at least I did until I moved house from somewhere I could be on that path in seconds, to somewhere where I have to dismantle my bike, put it in the boot of my car, drive to the path , reassemble the bike and then set off – quite a different experience. I’m sure a bike rack for the car would make things easier, but it’s sort of not the point. Ease of access is key.

So a year ago I bought a turbo trainer and got a subscription to Zwift (wikipedia and official site). I set up my bike in the garage and hooked up my phone to a cheap projector over its USB-C connector and now I get to cycle around the Champs-Élysées or a volcanic island whenever I like. 

I tried several alternatives to Zwift, in particular some of the free ones, but sadly none of them were as good.

It’s not quite a substitute for being outside, but it does tick the boxes for ease of access, gets me some exercise and the gamification and MMO aspect do mean that I forget about everything else whilst I’m cycling, a precious commodity since remote working kicked in and the gap between home and work reduced to zero. 

Look on my works

A few years ago I read Ivanhoe and, as intended, ended up suitably grumpy at the French and felt sorry for the Saxons.

Last weekend some roadworks forced me to drive through Cricklade for the first time. Cricklade was founded in 878 by the Saxons, and its church is dedicated to Samson of Dol, one of the Seven Founder Saints of Brittany.

One of the other notable British missionaries to Brittany was Gildas, who died in about 570, and who wrote the frankly wonderful De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (“On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain”) – an excoriation of the kings and priests who failed to stand up to the Saxons when they invaded and allowed the country to fall into what he considered ruin when the culture of Sub-Roman Britain was overthrown. The following is from a 19th century translation:

>KINGS Britain has, but they are as her tyrants: she has judges, but they are ungodly men: engaged in frequent plunder and disturbance, but of harmless men: avenging and defending, yea for the benefit of criminals and robbers. They have numerous wives, though harlots and adulterous women: they swear but by way of forswearing, making vows yet almost immediately use falsehood. They make wars, but the wars they undertake are civil and unjust ones. They certainly pursue thieves industriously throughout the country, whilst those thieves who sit with them at table, they not only esteem but even remunerate.

I keep thinking about how genuinely upset GIldas must have been to have written these screeds against the immorality of the country’s leaders. I guess nothing really changes.