simonh.uk - blogging

Announcing MyBackup.Blog Domain and Why

2025-01-21T00:00:00+00:00

I was driving back from a job in London today and got into thinking a bit deeper about URL’s, blogging and backups.

You may or may not know that I have a backup blog hosted on blogger.com with the address of:

s1m0nh.blogspot.com

Let’s look at that address for a minute. Firstly, it’s tied to a particular service, blogger.com. If I need to move it somewhere else, the whole address will of course have to change:

simonh.at-somewhere-else.com¹

So now, all the old links don’t work, which is not cool. Secondly, neither URL really describes what the address is about. One may be able to figure it out, but I think we can do better!

Today I bought mybackup.blog. My first user is me (of course). My new backup blog URL will forevermore be:

simonh.mybackup.blog

Which is only one character longer than the old one.

No more “I wonder where this link will take me?” questions. It’s all there in the URL. And that subdomain can point to any service, now and in the future.

tomsmith.mybackup.blog
bobscameras.mybackup.blog
someothertopic.mybackup.blog
etc.

Why Would I Want a “Backup” Blog?

I’m using the following definition:

one that serves as a substitute or support

I brought an extra pencil for backup.

a backup plan.

— Marriam Webster

Not as a backup / copy of your main blog!

With that out of the way, you may still be wondering why a backup blog is a good idea. Well, a few reasons spring to mind…

In case something happens to your regular blog

Outages happen. Companies shut up shop. Things go wrong on our servers. There are many reasons why your main blog might go dark for a time. If it does, you have another channel for your readers to stay updated.

As a drafting / note taking tool

I’ve previously written about using Blogger.com for just this purpose. You can use your backup blog as a notepad. Just save everything as a draft, then move to your main blog when you’re ready. This is probably of particular interest to users of static site generators (such as me). As great as they are, you can’t really use one without being at your computer as commands need to be run in a terminal.

Publish different content to your regular blog

Another option is to have your backup blog as a place to post content that maybe doesn’t fit with your main blog. You could also publish different styles of posts (longer or shorter than usual).

Why “mybackup.blog”?

I thought it important to have .blog as the domain extension. After all, this is a backup blog. Sadly, backup.blog was premium (~£1800 for the first year)! Another one I wanted was planb.blog. Already taken!

Your Thoughts?

Would you be interested in using a subdomain of mybackup.blog? If so, I’ll set a few up completely free.

you.mybackup.blog

Do you think it fair to charge about a quid or two per year for such a service? I’m only interested in covering the price of the domain, plus the few minutes to set each one up until I automate it.

Anyway, it’s been a very long day, so I’m hitting the hay. More to follow…

Footnotes

¹ I only have the stupid s1m0nh when simonh has been taken

Updates

2025-01-22: Add Why Would I Want a “Backup” Blog? and Why “mybackup.blog”? sections

Blog Questions Challenge

2025-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

For my last post, I won’t lie, it took a lot longer than I was expecting. But when I learnt of the blog questions challenge here, and typed that into Google. Wow! There you all are. Anyway, my turn now. Please be quiet while I concentrate…

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’ve always enjoyed writing.
That’s what the web is for! It belongs to all of us. Everyone should have a homepage.
To remember what I was once like (failed as I’ve lost more blogs than I remember).

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

Since about 2016 I’ve used Pelican. I chose it because it did everything I needed it to. Anything missing can be found (or written) as a plugin.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Just blogger.com as I remember. Actually, I also used Wordpress a couple of times on my original site simonharrison.net along with Jekyll and Hugo before settling with Pelican.

How do you write your posts?

I use Xed on Linux Mint. Everything is written in Textile (used to be Markdown). I know I should be a real man and use Vim or Emacs but I can’t be arsed with the learning curve. Maybe one day…

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I haven’t got an active coding project on the go. Also work has to be quiet as it is over Christmas. I plan to write at least one post a week from now on though. Even if’s just a short one.

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

Publish immediately. I am quite thorough to check for typo’s and silly mistakes before publishing. Like most bloggers, I find myself rechecking though, and updates are often required.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Can I have two? Ok great, thanks. My what’s it like to be bitten by a cat? one and my banned from linkedin one. The second one because I realised that social media and I will never coexist happily. Here, I can write whatever I want. Funnily enough, that makes me more considerate of other people! I try to avoid swearing in case youngsters land on one of my pages.

Any future plans for your blog?

Not really. I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last few weeks making tweaks, getting things just so. I wrote a post about that of course: Spruced up my blog.

Using Blogger as a Note Taking and Drafting Tool

2025-01-13T00:00:00+00:00

I write all of my posts in Textile which then get processed by the Textile Reader Pelican plugin and turned into HTML. I also write all posts on my desktop computer. But, since I seem to be obssessed with blogging again,¹ I’ve noticed that sometimes, I’ll be out and about, and an idea for a post, or an addition to an existing one, will occur to me. Since the average human brain can hold Seven, Plus or Minus Two bits of information in short term memory at one time, I can usually wait until I’m back at home to create:

my-next-great-post.textile

file to ensure it doesn’t get lost forever!

But, it’s been niggling at me that I should really have something available when I’m not at home. Of course, one option is to just write my own software. But I don’t fancy that as I’ve got other coding projects that have a higher priority than just a blogging notes software.

Another option is to use one of the, what, 8 million existing apps / platforms! But again, taking notes is not something in life that I’ve ever felt the need to go and try out this one, then that one, and eventually pick one and stick with it. If it ever did become a general problem, I’d just write my own thing. So, what to do…

Then, I remembered the old stalwart Blogger, which I’ve also written about here. As I wrote in that post, I’ve setup a backup blog on Blogger, in case anything awry happens here. But then I wondered how it would perform as a drafting tool? Not bad at all, as it happens:

That’s Textile, by the way. Beautiful, isn’t it? For those that are more comforable clicking buttons, the formatting toolbar will let you create your headings, stylings etc.

I wondered if anyone else had thought the same thing? Well no, not really. The only other article on the same subject I found was this one, by a fella called Don James.² So, just the two of us then…

Google, Are you Listening (Yet)?

The Official Blogger Blog hasn’t been updated since 2020. It seems like a load of work was done before that to get Blogger mobile friendly, and then… Nothing. Which is a shame as the Blogger platform is great for newcomers to the world of blogging.

It seems that since the intranets became dominant, blogging is very niche again (which suits me fine). It would be very sad, but is perhaps likely, that Blogger may well end up on this list here. But there is another option, another possible future. Even a renaissance for this once mighty platform.

An Alternative to Social Media?

Google have never dominated in social media. They’ve tried numerous times, but ended up pulling the plug each time. Maybe it’s time they went back to basics? Back to a time more akin to the early web. The quote below is taken from here, on the official Blogger blog:

Since 1999, millions of people have expressed themselves on Blogger. From detailed posts about almost every apple variety you could ever imagine to a blog dedicated to the art of blogging itself, the ability to easily share, publish and express oneself on the web is at the core of Blogger’s mission.

I think that’s a fine mission. And Google can use that mission to try and rescues those souls forever trapped inside the intranets. Get them back on the web where they have a chance to get their message out to everyone, now and forever into the future. It won’t happen quickly and Google will need to think very long term to succeed, but I think they are in the best position to achieve such a goal.

Footnotes

¹ I’m sure it’ll pass soon. I’ll probably disappear, then pop back up in about 2028!

² I had my idea independently of Don, but as he posted back in 2021 he needs crediting. Plus he comes at the topic from a slightly different angle. Worth a read.

Blog Post Categories and Tags

2025-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Happy 2025 internet surfers! This is a quick post with my thoughts about structuring blog post categories and tags.

These are just my thoughts today, and may change in the future. Doing your own thinking and research is always recommended!

Definitions

Google AI Overview says this:¹

A blog category is a broad topic that groups related posts together, acting like a chapter in a book, while a tag is a more specific keyword that describes the details of a single post, allowing you to link related content across different categories, similar to an index in a book; essentially, categories provide a high-level overview of topics, while tags offer a granular view of individual post content.

I think that definition is good enough for us.

My Approach

I write this after (yet again) attempting to tidy up and rationalise my categories and tags. I’ve written a few post about OpenSMTPD and they had a category of mail and a tag of opensmtpd. I’ve decided it makes more sense to just tag them smtp so if I decide to write a post about Postfix, or Exim, they will also be categorised as mail and tagged as smtp.

As usual, there is no one correct way. If you run a humourous blog, you probably won’t need a “humour” category as everything is (hopefully) going to be funny. Instead your categories might be:

People
Animals
Bloopers
Pranks
Classic

and your tags might be:

Old People
Kids
Cats
Dogs
Rabbits

Why it Matters

If you have RSS or Atom feeds that people actually read, then it will matter a lot. Regular web search visitors also might want to read other posts with a similar theme. Picking and sticking to a sensible naming convention will help both you, and them.

Footnotes

¹ I must admit the new first AI Overview result is often the best. God help us humans :(

Using Blogger in 2025

2024-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

Hello Old Lad!

I’ve had a couple of emails about my Why start your own blog in 2025 post. Both were similarly themed:

What software do you recommend?
What’s the easiest way to get started with a blog?

Now usually I’d recommend a static site generator. But, if you’re wanting to just dip your toe in the water and see if having a blog is right for you, that’s a lot of upfront work. Potentially enough to make you abandon the whole idea. I wasn’t having that. So I had a little think, did a bit of research on the internet, and then remembered blogger.com.

Even though I haven’t been on the site for years, there was my profile. Exactly as I’d left it!

As you can see from the screenshot above, I had planned to conquer the internet with my Money Making Ideas¹ and Learn Touch Typing sites. Oh, the silly (and lazy) boy I was. Of course I had to look to see what rubbish I’d put on there:

I told you I was lazy. Nada. No wonder I’m still not rich.

How Easy is Blogger to Use?

Very. I set up a new blog: Burton on Trent Stuff, picked a blogspot subdomain for it to live: burton-on-trent.blogspot.com and there it was! So I added a test post

The web interface is very straightforward. You’ve got a pane on the left for creating new posts and pages, and some fiddling bits and bobs. At the bottom is helpful button to see how your blog looks:

The rest of the page is a list of your posts or pages.

Can I Backup, Move, Delete a Blogger Blog?

In the interests of science, I decided to sacrifice one of my Blogger blogs (that had no posts). Clicking on delete blog shows this dialogue:

Thanks! I won’t bother this time though, Google. I’m sure I’ll survive without a backup of my empty blog!

As for exporting a blog, according to Wordpress everything should be tickety-boo (screenshot from above link):

Use as a Backup Blog!

Another use case for Blogger is as a backup site in case something happens to your main site. I’ve set up s1m0nh.blogspot.com for just this purpose. I know s1m0nh is a silly subdomain but that’s my fallback if simonh has been taken. If they’re both gone, I just go with:

whydoeseveryoneinsistontakingmyusernames

That one’s always available. Please do not steal it.

You could also use your blogspot.com site for comments, or as a contact page. It took me a few minutes to find out how, but it’s actually simple.

On the Blogger main page, click on Layout, then click on Add a Gadget (to the area of the page you want it displayed), find the one that says Contact form and click it:

Then, back on the main site, you’ll now see the contact form widget (where you can also turn it off or rename it by clicking the pen icon):

Finally, click on view blog and you should now see your contact form on your blogspot.com site:

Of course, I don’t take anything for granted, so I sent a test email

Afterword

I’ve got to hand it to Google. It still does the job of setting up a blog, adding posts, editing posts and all that good stuff very well. Yeah, there are lots of new, shiny, hip options today, but for getting something up and running in five minutes, I don’t think anything else can beat Blogger.

You can set up a blog, subdomain, contact page, blog comments in five minutes! If anyone knows anything quicker than that, shoot me an email (or use my blogspot contact page).

Updates

2025-01-05: Add Blogger logo and move profile photo down page

2025-01-04: Add section about Using blogger as a backup blog

2025-01-02: Add section about Backing up, moving, deleting a blog

Footnotes

¹ Anyone old enough to remember Griz and his make money online blogspot site? I think he inspired this…

Great YouTube Talks and Clips for Bloggers

2024-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

A Short YouTube Playlist

In all honesty, the only video on this page that you need to watch is the first one.

If I’ve missed anything important, please let me know by email.

The first one has got to be John Gruber from Daring Fireball. Anyone making $11,000 a week has my attention! Highly recommended to watch all of this (45 minutes):

Next is a very short video (56 seconds) by Lisa Stone. 56 seconds well spent though.

How To Be A Style Blogger (< 10 minutes). Not my field, but if you’re wanting to make money fashion blogging, this might help.

The 9 Best Tips for Your First Month of Blogging I Wish I Knew (< 15 minutes).

What are Atom Feeds and How Do I Use Them?

2024-12-28T00:00:00+00:00

Where I explain the new orange icon on the main menu…

First Things First

I am very late to the syndication party (19 years late)! But we are when we are and maybe you slept through this phase of the internet as well?¹ So I’ve spent a bit of time today, seeing what atom feeds are all about and how they can help publishers and readers.

What’s The Big Idea?

Back before the internet got ruined by social media, internet surfers² would often get their news, gossip, tips etc. from various old fashioned websites. But, it soon got tedious having to:

Go to favourite site 1 and see what’s new
Go to favourite site 2 and see what’s new
Go to favourite site 3 and see what’s new
Go to favourite site 4 and see what’s new

So, clever people invented a lightweight, machine readable data format that could concisely describe HTML documents. These XML documents could be subscribed to by news reader software, thereby enabling an internet surfer² to very quickly get a summary of all new content generated since their last visit to those sites.

Below is a snippet of one of my atom feeds:

What Are Feeds?

Wikipedia says this:

On the World Wide Web, a web feed (or news feed) is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe a channel to it by adding the feed resource address to a news aggregator client (also called a feed reader or a news reader). Users typically subscribe to a feed by manually entering the URL of a feed or clicking a link in a web browser or by dragging the link from the web browser to the aggregator, thus “RSS and Atom files provide news updates from a website in a simple form for your computer.”

The amazing thing (well I think it’s amazing), is that these feeds are usually split into different categories (plus one called all.atom.xml which is all categories combined obviously). The screenshot below is what you’ll see if you click on my Atom feed icon:

So, if you think everything I write is pointless and stupid³, except my recipe posts, you can subscribe only to that topic!

What Do I need?

Subscribing to feeds used to be built in to most web browsers. Sadly, they’ve all (as far I can determine) decided to drop feed reading support. The good news is there are lots of browser extensions that have filled the void.

The one I’m using right now is Feedbro which seems to work perfectly fine.

From their website:

We believe time is our most valuable asset. We believe it is waste of valuable time to spend minutes or even hours every day to go through dozens of websites, blogs, social media sites etc. manually. We believe that all the new information that you are interested in, should be automatically aggregated into one place from various sources you care about (both Internet and intranet) into easy-to-read format and automatically filtered based on the rules you define. We believe that the faster you learn, gain new knowledge and information the better you will succeed in life as an individual and as an organization. Therefore it is vital to learn new things every day and follow relevant and valuable sources of information effortlessly. We believe privacy is important so that only you know what sources you follow.

Can’t argue with any of that.

So, if I’ve managed to convince you that you should at least give using feeds a try, you might want to just install Feedbro and spend a few minutes getting used to it and subscribing to some feeds.

Once you’ve got the extension installed and you’ve opened it, you’ll see this:

Click on the Add a New Feed button
Copy and paste the feed address (for example):
- https://simonh.uk/feeds/blogging.atom.xml

Once you’ve added some feeds, they’ll now appear on the left side of the Feedbro Reader (had to zoom in for this screenshot):

If you’re on Linux, and prefer a dedicated news reader, this might be of interest.

As always, if you’ve got something to say, or need help, send me an email (link at bottom of page). Good luck and happy new year!

Updates

References and Further Reading

Are RSS feeds still used?
The Rise and Demise of RSS
Choosing an RSS and Atom Feed Reader
RSS/Atom feed: why you should have one for your blog

Footnotes

¹ I’ve always been aware of RSS, just never had a need to use it.

² That’s what we were called back then. Ask your grandparents for details.

³ Hey! I didn’t force you to come here…

Managing Blog Post Updates

2024-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Change is the Only Constant

By the time a newspaper is in your hands, it’s already out of date. Things will have changed. Maybe what you’re reading now, is close enough to the latest situation. Maybe not. The same goes for internet sites. So, we have a choice:

Update our original post as needed.
Write a new post when enough changes have happened.
Don’t worry about it! Everything was correct at the time.

I prefer the first option as a general rule. It’s (I think) the easiest and most honest way of letting a reader know that the post / article has been modified since published.

What Changes Matter?

Let’s say you’ve written a product review, gushing over how great something is. One month later, the thing is dead. I’d like to know about that. You may have just been unlucky, but still let us know.

Or, some tips post that you wrote has an important update, a new best practice has been found. Let us know, please!

Finally factual mistakes and corrections need to be relayed. If you change a URL from:

/my-great-blog-post-about-cats

but then realise that dogs also deserve some love:

/my-great-blog-post-about-cats-and-dogs

It wouldn’t hurt to let the reader now about that too.

What Not to Include?

If you decide to change the category or tag of a post, that’s an internal change. No reader will really care about it. Typo’s are also not really ~~importnt~~ important either.

Notifying the Reader about Updates

I haven’t fully settled on my own best practice yet. But I think I’m going to try and get in the habit of having a line at the top of the page stating:

Page Last Updated On: YYYY-MM-DD

or,

Attention: Please see the Updates section at the bottom of this page as important changes have been made to this post!

Your Thoughts?

I’m sure other bloggers have their own techniques and ideas. If you have any tips or comments, you can email from the bottom of this page.

Updates

2024-12-29: Learned how to add an SVG image directly to a stylesheet. Previously I’d have all svg’s directly embedded in the html. So now Updates and Footnotes have nice looking icons before the text. I like this in particular for Updates as the asterisk makes it obvious to a reader as it’s found at the top and bottom of a post. My goal is that if a reader see the asterisk below the published date, they can be assured that (at the very least) there’s a short summary of the changes in the Updates section.

2024-12-28: This morning I finally decided on just including an updated date (if applicable) below the published date.

It took a while as I couldn’t decide on having it near the top or at the bottom of the page. Then, it was a question of have it on the same line, the line below? Then, it was alignment doubts (left, centre, right)…

Once I decided to have it on the line below the published date, I then became obsessed with having the two dates lined up!

Ah well. it’s done now.

Response to Codemzy Best Blog URL Structure

2024-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

Choosing a Blog URL Structure

Today, I came across a post by codemzy which I’ve decided to respond to¹. Below I list his² issues, and below that my responses to those issues (and my thoughts). The four most common URL structures for blogs he lists are below:

The Four Blog Post URL Idioms

Post ID only in URL
Post date + title in URL
Post category + title in URL
Simpy the post title

1. Post ID only in URL

I agree. Completely stupid.

I’m not sure where those ID’s are coming from. Something like Wordpress? Random alphanumeric strings have an important place, just not in a URL. Unless it’s part of an auth process…

simonh.uk/euH0nionl7

Ugh.

2. Post date + title in URL

This is my preferred URL structure

I see no problem in having the original post date in a URL. Many bloggers / sites do this. I would suggest that the date of a post is nearly as important as the post title (and its content):

/2024/12/05/best-things-to-do-in-x-this-christmas
/2025/12/05/best-things-to-do-in-x-this-christmas
/2026/12/05/best-things-to-do-in-x-this-christmas

If a post is not so obviously tied up to an annual event (as above), it’s easy to add updates at either the top or bottom of the page to let the reader know new information has been added or removed. Or, that the whole post is now obsolete. I’ve seen that quite a few times. I believe the date of a post matters. I prefer a post that still has the original date along with comments about what has changed, over time.

3. Post category + title in URL

This is where collisions / problems can start to occur

Let’s take codemzy’s post as an example:

https://www.codemzy.com/blog/best-blog-url-structure

Maybe he’s been neglecting his blog for a while. Completely forgot that he wrote this post years ago! So he writes what he thinks is a new post. But it isn’t. It has the URL of

/blogging/best-blog-url-structure

Naturally, the first time he wrote this same post, it would have had the catergory of blogging and the title os best-blog-url-structure.

Oops!

4. Simply the post title

See above (same problem). But, I agree, the category doesn’t need to be part of the URL. We can figure that out that out from the post title.

We’ve now just removed one path component: the category. Stil have the same chance of collisions as the category should be the same for mulitple posts e.g. blogging

My Simple Approach

Using the codemzy example again, we can simply have two posts:

https://www.codemzy.com/2023/05/23/best-blog-url-structure
https://www.codemzy.com/2028/01/15/best-blog-url-structure

Or X number of posts on exactly the same subject to show that opinions / best practices have changed over time.

The search engines are pretty smart nowadays. They’ll offer the latest post. All codemzy has to do is include a note that he wrote a similar post in the past (and link to it), but has he now has different views.

Conclusion

As with all things, upfront thought can save annoyance and unwanted work in the future. And this is something any blogger should think about. By having the date as part of the URL, collisions are impossible³ so it’s one less thing to worry about.

For example, let’s say I decide to have a weekly blog series:

Things I learnt this week

which I write every Sunday. By having the date as part of the URL:

2024/12/15/things-i-leant-this-week
2024/12/22/things-i-leant-this-week
2024/12/29/things-i-leant-this-week

I’m not having to figure out how to express each week (should I use week commencing or the ISO week format)? Plus each URL is unique anyway, but for the SEO minded, I might appear to be an expert on learning things each week.

Updates

This section is for any additions, deletions or corrections that may be required.

Footnotes

¹ Mainly as this was the first natural result returned. I have my own ideas on this topic, hence this post.

² I have assumed Codemzy is male, if not please let me know by email, and I’ll correct this.

³ Unless you use exactly the same post title for two different posts on the same day. If so, no one can help you!

Organising Blog Post Images in Pelican

2024-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

That /img Folder Just Keeps Growing!

Recently, I found that I had over 120 images in my static /img directory (where blog post images live). It’s been bugging me for a while, so last night I thought I’d better deal with it. The reason it’s an issue having all those loose files is:

The likelihood of duplicates grows i.e. /img/screenshot19.png
There’s no easy way of knowing which images belong to which post¹
It looks (and feels) messy

The best solution would be to get Pelican to just handle it for me. That didn’t seem to be an option (not easily anyway). Possibly, I could modify my content/posts structure to have one directory per post and have the images in the same directory as the post (that seems to be what some people do). That would have involved modifiying every post which I didn’t want to do as not all my posts have images.

Some have zero
Some have one
A few have multiple

So, I decided I needed another method. The one I settled on is:

/img/YYYY-MM-DD/image1.jpg

Here’s how my content/img looks now:

So the screenshot above is served from:

https://simonh.uk/img/2024-12-24/new_folders.webp

If on 1st January 2025, I decide to write another post involving changing some other directory structure, it won’t be /img/new_folders1.webp Instead it’ll be /img/2025-01-01/new_folders.webp Much better.

By the way, I did consider using the blog post title as the folder name:

/img/organising-blog-post-images-in-pelican/

but that’s a lot of typing. Plus I’d need some way of organising by year at the very least anyway. By just using the date, I know that if a folder exists, it must have at least one image in it (otherwise it wouldn’t exist). I can also quickly and easily find which image directory is linked with each post (as the date is part of the URL). That there may be more than post associated with an image directory won’t be a problum as if there may be confusion, I can simply name the image file slightly better to avoid that confusion.

For example, let’s say I’m being very productive today (2024-12-24) and write five posts about the following topics:

A recent holiday I had
Some Linux program I’ve been using
A book review
A cheesecake recipe
Why women have smaller feet than men²

I can just have holiday1.jpg, holiday2.jpg, linux1.jpg, book5.jpg, cheese1.jpg etc. saved in /img/2024-12-24/ This method will make it easier than ever to know what belongs to what.³

I spent about an hour and a half checking each post from 2020 to now, seeing which ones had images, altering the path from /img/image.webp to /img/YYYY-MM-DD/image.webp. Doing a live reload for each altered post to check that I hadn’t made any silly mistakes. I think everything is fine, both locally and on the live site. It was a bit of unwanted work, but from now on, I’ve just got to get used to typing an extra 11 characters to the path. I’m a fast typist so I think it’s worth it for the better organisation (I’ll automate it if it becomes annoying).

I generally don’t write more than one or two posts in a given day, so each dated directory shouldn’t have too many images (16 images is the most for one day, so far). And I believe that organising by date in the YYYY-MM-DD format gives natural sorting (oldest to newest). As I don’t plan on ever changing the URL format:

simonh.uk/YYYY/MM/DD/blog-post-title

I’ll never need to worry about image paths again! If in the future I decide to group by year as well (which I probably won’t):

/img/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD/image.jpg

That’ll only apply from that year onwards. But, I don’t think that’s necessary unless I get to the tens of millions of files and directories.

What strategies have other Pelican users come up with to deal with this problem?

Footnotes

¹ I was trying to include the key post idea as the first word of the image filename to keep them together conceptually, but now that’s not necessary.

² This was just a random idea that popped into my head. There’s trillions of webpages on the subject, if you’re interested!

³ Another option is:

/img/2024-12-24/hol/
/img/2024-12-24/cheese/
/img/2024-12-24/book/

I haven’t felt the need for subdirectories within the date folder yet, but you may want to consider it if you have multiple posts, with multiple images sharing the same post date.

Update on 2025-01-10

Having all my post photos in folders was good, but then I noticed that I had lots of loose svg’s in /img, plus some other random pictures / photos / logos. Thought I’d better be organised with them too, so created folders for: svg, logo, misc, nav. Think the final thing to do is have a folder called tmp, where I can shove images that’ll be required for future posts. All in all, looking very neat and tidy (again)!

├── logo
│   ├── apache.svg
│   ├── bash.svg
│   ├── blogger_logo.webp
│   ├── bottle.svg
│   ├── debian.svg
│   ├── dropbox.svg
│   ├── fastmail.webp
│   ├── gnu_gpg.svg
│   ├── gnu.webp
│   ├── linkedin.svg
│   ├── linked_out.svg
│   ├── mercurial.svg
│   ├── opensmtpd.png
│   ├── opensmtpd.webp
│   ├── pelican.png
│   ├── pelican.webp
│   ├── sqlite.svg
│   └── textile.webp
├── misc
│   └── code.webp
├── nav
│   ├── back.svg
│   ├── back-to-top.svg
│   ├── home.svg
│   ├── next.svg
│   └── prev.svg
├── shock.jpg
├── speechless.jpg
├── standby2.webp
├── standby3.webp
├── standby4.webp
├── standby5.webp
├── standby.webp
├── svg
│   ├── asterisk.svg
│   ├── category.svg
│   ├── cross.svg
│   ├── footnote.svg
│   ├── idea.svg
│   ├── info.svg
│   ├── new.svg
│   ├── question-alt.svg
│   ├── question.svg
│   ├── readme.svg
│   ├── summary.svg
│   ├── tag.svg
│   ├── tick.svg
│   ├── update.svg
│   └── warn.svg
├── terminal.svg
├── the_end.webp
└── wifi.svg

Spruced Up My Blog

2024-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Ready for 2025

Since I started intermittently blogging again in 2020, I haven’t really done much style-wise with this site. I use the static site generator, Pelican, and a theme called Pelican Paper (details and links on my About page). To be fair, Pelican Paper is good to go straight out of the box. However, I’m a fussy little so-and-so and had some things I wanted to change. As business is a bit quiet this time of year, I decided to tackle it.

Self Hosted Fonts

Over the last few years I’ve been self hosting Google fonts on my servers for my Python projects. Unlike a few years ago, doing this takes about 15 minutes today. I view fonts as just another asset like a stylesheet, an image, an html file. Might as well host it myself. Here, I’m using Crimson Pro for headings, Public Sans for body text, JetBrains Mono for code. I think these fonts go really well together.

Adding Post Images / Logos

Many of my posts were just text, which is fine, but I think some are better with an image or a logo (if the post is about a specific product, platform or software). I’ve been doing this over a few days, and I think the backlog is now cleared.

Improving Organisation of Post Images

I’ve written a dedicated post about this here. Have a read if you’re interested.

Better Pagination

Pagination was set at ten posts per page. I’ve increased that to twenty five. I don’t like clicking buttons unnecessarily, and I’m sure you don’t either.

Take Atom Feeds More Seriously

The static site generator I use: Pelican, has always generated atom feeds. Until now, I’d paid no attention to them. I’m now looking into how these will help notify readers about posts which get frequently updated (see below). Once I’m au fait with how these operate, I’ll write a post on the topic.

Make Use of Post Modified Date

I’m also trying to be a bit more disciplined about keeping track of when I last modified a post. For example, my post about getting banned from linkedin which I originally wrote in 2021, has been updated this month with a bit more text and some images. Same with my review post of Drake’s tobacco concentrates.

Styled Footnotes

I’ve become quite a fan of footnotes lately. The problem can be that they’re hard to see on the page. I’ve decided to make mine blue and add a bit of padding. Again, I’m quite chuffed with how they now look.¹

Better Styled `<mark>` Tag

I find the default mark styling a little bit too yellow. I was after something a little bit more subtle, but still eye catching. Quickly found, and copied this style from A Beautiful Site. Very happy with how this looks.

Version CSS Files to Force Browser Refresh When Updated

As I have Apache set to cache assets such as css and js files set to access +1 month any changes I made weren’t visible, unless a visitor has the option to disable cache. I was going to reduce the duration down to a week but thought there must be a better way. There is!

All I had to do was append a version number. Then when a browser looks in it’s cache, it notices the cached one is stale and downloads the new one. In my case, this meant just renaming paper.css to paper-1.0.css. Tested on my Android mobile (which doesn’t seem to have a disable cache option), and it works great.

Improve Appearance of Tags

The default appearance of tags at the bottom of an article was quite hard to see:

So I put a border around them and made the font slightly darker:

Add Some Nav Links

Decided to add a back link and a home link next to reply to this post on article page.

Old:

New:

Implement an Update Policy

I’m using the word policy liberally here. I’ve written a post about managing blog post updates but at the time of writing that one, I hadn’t made my mind up entirely. My policy now is that when I update a post, the modifed / updated date is displayed beneath the original publication date, highlighted by an aserisk. At the bottom of the page, I have an Updates section, with a brief summary of what was added or removed on a particular date.

More Icons

I like icons as they convey information quickly to a reader.

This is a question header

Here’s what we have covered

I’ve had an idea

This is important (it’s not but could have been).

I’ll probably add a few more. You guessed it. Info icon.

This is new and exciting!

Future Changes

I might decrease the margins on some templates. In particular, on mobile I think there’s a bit too much whitespace on the sides on the index page with the new fonts.

Footnotes

¹ Just a demo of the new style.

Updates

2025-01-09: Add Add some nav links section.

2025-01-04: Add More Icons section.

2025-01-03: Add Implement an Update Policy section.

2025-01-01: Add Improve appearance of tags section.

2024-12-31: Add Version CSS Files to Force Browser Refresh When Updated section. Also add this Updates section to match what I do on other posts. See this post for details.

Why Start Your Own Blog in 2025?

2024-12-20T00:00:00+00:00

Location, Location, Location

The most important consideration in buying real estate is its location.

The saying goes. Well, that’s true. But not only of real estate. The same is true for someone selling hot food out of a van in a lay-by. Pick a bad lay-by: make no money. pick a good one: prosper. It’s common sense. Writing on someone else’s ~~platform~~ intranet is like being a market trader. Competing with all the other traders in the market (not necessarily for money, more for attention). But there aren’t any customers there. It’s just other traders. Having your own blog is like being in a lay-by, on your own. It’ll take you a while to find out if you picked a good lay-by (and are providing good food)!

Got something to ~~say~~ write? Start your own blog. Get a domain name, get a VPS, pick a static site generator (there are lots).¹ Spend a day figuring things out, start blogging.

But, we’ve got Facebook, Linkedin, Tiktok, X etc now!

No. The owners of those intranets have them. Not you. You are a user. You are a product. Ever read the terms and conditions? Unlikely. Ever tried moving all of your content from their platform to somewhere else? Good luck with that. Even the latest darling for professional writers, Substack, has quite a few terms you’ll need to agree to. Don’t forget to read the Publisher Agreement as well!

Your House, Your Rules

When you run your own blog, you’re in charge. You’re an author, an editor, a proof reader. Oh, and a researcher. Maybe a photographer, too. That’s a lot of transferable skills you’re going to get better at. Want to write a post about something that you’re pretty sure is of no interest to anyone but you? Do it. You might be surprised when it gets some views.

Searchability

Let’s try an experiment. Let’s search for something on the internet. Hmmmm. Ok, I’ve got one:

best laptop to buy

1st result: Techradar (a blog)

The rest of the first five pages of results (I got bored) is dominated by blogs, with a few shopping sites and legacy media sites. Reddit appears as the first result in the discussions and forums section.

Note: Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram, Tiktok…

Nothing. At. All.

What’s that you say? Try something not involved with buying something? Good point. I’ll try again…

What is the purpose of life

I’m sure the social media plaforms are bursting at the seams with philosophers, gurus, genuises etc.

Nope.

Blogs, wikipedia, Quora (forum), religious blogs (to be expected) dominate.

Note: To be fair, a linkedin page² was near the bottom of the first page, and they had a second result on the second page. I also tried on bing.com. Same dismal failure as on Google.

But you can see that the social media silos (generally) don’t return results on the internet. That’s because they’re not really on the internet. They’re actually intranets:

From Wikipedia

An intranet is a computer network for sharing information, easier communication, collaboration tools, operational systems, and other computing services within an organization, usually to the exclusion of access by outsiders. The term is used in contrast to public networks, such as the Internet, but uses the same technology based on the Internet protocol suite.

Longevity

I was quite surprised a few months ago when I got an email from a reader about a post I’d written three years before (most emails I receive are within a few weeks / months of a post). You don’t get that on Facebook, do you? There’s so much stuff flying around, it’s hard to remember what was posted yesterday, let alone last week.

When you have your own blog, that’s what happens. You write a post about something that’s on your mind and forget about it. At some point in the future, someone else has that same topic in mind, searches for it, and lands on your post. Everything is a lot more relaxed. No urgency. Ever.

Skill Development

I’ve already mentioned this earlier, but I think it warrants it’s own section (especially for younger people).

Starting and maintainig a blog requires a number of skills:

Being able / willing to write

It doesn’t need to be perfect. You can just write as you wish. One of my favourite novels ever is The Dog Stars by Peter Heller. Here are tho opening few paragraphs:

He’s written the book in the style of someone not particularly well educated. It doesn’t matter. The book is still fantastic.

Being able to organise your time effectively

When you have your own blog, you’re going to need to manage your time. Maybe you want to write one post / article a week. Maybe one every day. On the other hand you may be like me, and sometimes write two or three posts in one day, then silence for months.

Whatever your style, you’re still going to eventually have to sit down and put ~~pen to paper~~ fingers on keyboard. That means forgoing watching a bit of TV or YouTube, gaming, tiktoking, or whatever else gobbles up your free time (and gives you nothing in return).

The Never Ending Project

I’ve long been an advocate of always having projects on the go. Whether that be learning something new, such as a new language, programming, how to draw etc. Running your own blog will mean you’ll always have something to do. Writing a new article, updating an old one, fixing a mistake, tweaking your theme / layout. You’ll never, ever, have nothing to do once you start blogging!

Even if you can’t thing of anything to write, you can write about that. Or, take a break from writing and take some photos and upload an article titled something like: A Trip to Cannock Chase. Why not? Doing something is better than doing nothing.

In the Old Days

In the early days of the web, their were sites, forums, blogs. That was it, pretty much. Everyone knew how important the web would become. I’ve owned the domain simonharrison.net since 2002. Back in the day I had a blog. Then, for some reason, I didn’t (I forget why). Many people forgot about blogging. Went onto a plaform that made everything easier. Became more concerned with likes and shares than value. Or, just went on the internet when they needed to, as a tourist. Well, that ease made them untold billions of dollars and made you inept at having your own home on the internet (erm, what’s a VPS?). Correct that error in 2025.

What’s the Point?

This blog is not about making money. Not made a penny and don’t plan on making a penny from it. I don’t have analytics set up. I did but decided that it didn’t matter if I get one visitor a month, or one million. I have things to say occasionally and I write a post. Sometimes I get an email from a happy reader thanking me for a tutorial post. Sometimes I get an email from an old friend who randomly searched for my name, surprised that I was the first result. Sometimes I get an email from someone responding to a post asking for more information.

That is why I do this and why you should too. Welcome to the long tail of the internet…

Getting Started

Well, you’ve got lots of choices! Fundamentally, they boil down to choosing between self hosting or using a platform. I’m not a big fan of “platforms”, but when it comes to blogging, they do make getting started much easier.

On the other hand, if you decide to host your own blog, you’ll have full control over every aspect of it. They do come at the cost of a steeper learning curve though.

You’ll have to decide whether to use a static site generator such as Pelican, Hugo, Jekyll, or a database driven one, like Worpress. One that is sort of in between, and I used many years ago is Grav. It doesn’t use a database, but does require PHP.

As I wrote in another post, for those people just wanting to have a go at blogging and see if they enjoy it, you can’t really get any easier than Blogger.com.

Updates

2025-01-10: Add never ending project section.

2025-01-04: Add getting started section.

2024-12-30: Add skill development section.

2024-12-28: Add searchability section.

Footnotes

¹ Just be thankful you aren’t writing all HTML by hand, then FTP’ing to your ~10MB slice of someone’s server on a dialup connection.

² These pages are ones that the linkedin intranet allows you to set as publicly viewable.

How To Make Google Analytics Work With Pelican Bricks Theme

2016-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

Note: This post is from an old Pelican blog I used to have at simonh.me, which I found on a backup drive on 2025-01-07. It's probably of no use, but reposted for posterity!

I thought I'd put this on here in case anyone else had the same problem. By the way, some of the code samples below have been reformated so will look different to the linked files.

The Problem

I'm using this theme for my son's website: https://github.com/getpelican/pelican-themes/tree/master/bricks. He likes it a lot and it seemed to tick all the right boxes.

It actually works. Many of the themes I tried on pelican-themes didn't work.
It's responsive. Pretty much mandatory especially considering when his friends visit his site, they'll be on their phone.
It looks nice. Again, quite important, especially as their aren't many themes (that I could find) which are suited to a childrens site.
~~It supports Google Analytics~~. Well, I thought it did.

In the file templates/analytics.html from the above repo, there is this code:

{% if GOOGLE_ANALYTICS %}
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
try {
        var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("{{GOOGLE_ANALYTICS}}");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
} catch(err) {}</script>
{% endif %}

I checked in templates/base.html (which all other pages inherit from, I believe) but there was no mention of Google Analytics. Below is the very bottom of base.html:

</div>
        </row>
        {% endblock %}
        </div>
        {% include 'trademark.html' %}
</div>
</body>
</html>

I thought that may be the problem. So, I checked the theme I'm using for this site https://github.com/duilio/pelican-octopress-theme.

At the bottom of templates/base.html we have this:

</div>
</div>
<footer role="contentinfo">{% include '_includes/footer.html' %}</footer>
        <script src="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/js/modernizr-2.0.js"></script>
        <script src="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/js/ender.js"></script>
        <script src="{{ SITEURL }}/theme/js/octopress.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
        {% include '_includes/after_footer.html' %}
</body>
</html>

I then checked in _includes/after_footer.html which contains this:

{% include '_includes/analytics.html' %}
{% include '_includes/piwik.html' %}
{% include '_includes/disqus_script.html' %}
{% include '_includes/twitter_sharing.html' %}
{% include '_includes/google_plus_one.html' %}
{% include '_includes/facebook_like.html' %}
{% include '_includes/isso_script.html' %}

That seemed to be what the bricks theme was missing. I altered base.html to this:

</div>
</row>
{% endblock %}
</div>
        {% include 'trademark.html' %}
</div>
        {% include 'after_footer.html' %}
</body>
</html>

created the file after_footer.html with this line in:

{% include 'analytics.html' %}

Copied the contents of analytics.html from the octopress theme to the bricks theme, and we're done!

This should work with other themes as well. I plan on becoming better acquainted with Jinja2 and create or modify some themes for other projects so check back every now and then.

simonh.uk - blogging

Announcing MyBackup.Blog Domain and Why

Why Would I Want a “Backup” Blog?

In case something happens to your regular blog

As a drafting / note taking tool

Publish different content to your regular blog

Why “mybackup.blog”?

Your Thoughts?

Footnotes

Updates

Blog Questions Challenge

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

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

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

How do you write your posts?

When do you feel most inspired to write?

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

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Any future plans for your blog?

Using Blogger as a Note Taking and Drafting Tool

Google, Are you Listening (Yet)?

An Alternative to Social Media?

Footnotes

Blog Post Categories and Tags

Definitions

Categories

Tags

My Approach

Why it Matters

Footnotes

Using Blogger in 2025

Hello Old Lad!

How Easy is Blogger to Use?

Can I Backup, Move, Delete a Blogger Blog?

Use as a Backup Blog!

Afterword

Updates

Footnotes

Great YouTube Talks and Clips for Bloggers

A Short YouTube Playlist

What are Atom Feeds and How Do I Use Them?

First Things First

What’s The Big Idea?

What Are Feeds?

What Do I need?

Updates

References and Further Reading

Footnotes

Managing Blog Post Updates

Change is the Only Constant

What Changes Matter?

What Not to Include?

Notifying the Reader about Updates

Your Thoughts?

Updates

Response to Codemzy Best Blog URL Structure

Choosing a Blog URL Structure

The Four Blog Post URL Idioms

1. Post ID only in URL

2. Post date + title in URL

3. Post category + title in URL

4. Simply the post title

My Simple Approach

Conclusion

Updates

Footnotes

Organising Blog Post Images in Pelican

That /img Folder Just Keeps Growing!

Footnotes

Update on 2025-01-10

Spruced Up My Blog

Ready for 2025

Self Hosted Fonts

Adding Post Images / Logos

Improving Organisation of Post Images

Better Pagination

Take Atom Feeds More Seriously

Make Use of Post Modified Date

Styled Footnotes

Better Styled <mark> Tag

Better Styled `<mark>` Tag