09/05/2018

The archive contains older posts which may no longer reflect my current views.

# My wife asked the other day how I could spend so much time working on my blog when it just looks like a plain page with words on. What is there to do?

Yes, it looks very minimal - that's by design. Still, there is a lot that goes on in the background and I'm often changing things or adding new features even if it doesn't look like it.

Nitin recently called it "ridiculously well-built" which is very flattering, but I just think of it as getting things right and working just how I want.

# On the subject of blogging, it's my lifeblood, it's what keeps me going. I just love to write. But, although I see a lot of the posts as first drafts of ideas, part of me wonders if concentrating so much on it is hindering work on "the book" and whether I should step back and focus. Perhaps take an online sabbatical like Patrick Rhone.

# My commute home was spent fixing the display of "related posts" in the comments. It's supposed to show the post title but I still had a number of posts from last year that had none - from before I started automatically replacing them with the date/time.

Even after adding the date/time to those there were still instances of related posts being listed with no page title. I couldn't figure out why until I realised they were from before I changed the permalink structure - the redirects were preventing the page source being loaded via curl.

I, therefore, had to reuse the code snippet from my 404 page to grab the new, redirected URL. Problem solved!