Colin Walker - random posts

The choice of distro was taken out of my hands. CuteFish wouldn't boot when installed – even though it ran fine from a USB stick. Elementary OS installed but suffered from the issue many flavours of Linux do on older Apple hardware: an issue with Broadcom drivers means WiFi doesn't work. Despite following a few different guides I couldn't work around it.

Next up was Zorin OS Core. Somewhat surprisingly, this installed, booted and had working drivers. So this is what I'm sticking with for now. If it works out I may upgrade to the Pro version with different desktop layouts.

I may loop back to CuteFish in the future, once it has gone through a few more iterations, as that is the one I really wanted to try but Zorin was a close second. It's just a shame you can't get the MacOS look without going Pro.

2024/04/27#p1

Dave Winer links to one of his testers timing how long it takes to publish a post using Drummer – "less than 9.24 seconds" from hitting the + icon:

"pasted in this sentence, clicked the Publish icon, turned to the browser tab where my blog appears, and refreshed the screen"

Dave says he'd "love to see the same benchmark done with other blogging software."

The same process with (b)log-In takes less than 2 seconds with no need to change tabs or manually refresh. As soon as you hit "post" the change is instant.

2024/04/27#p3

The start here page can sometimes take a moment to load depending on which posts are randomly selected and whether they have links.

Even though MySQL is pretty quick, when conducting multiple recursive queries a bit of delay is inevitable. So I thought I'd add a temporary "loading" notice which then loads the actual page content (once generated) into the current body with HTMX.

I had also added this for /reader (replacing "mixed content" images takes a little while) but it caused some other issues so I need to work on that.

Colin Walker