Dear Readers

Dear readers,

Just a bit of notice. I am becoming increasingly annoyed and frustrated by WordPress. Constant issues with the system, the necessity of paying for extra security on the site (which is insane for a tiny blog with about 24 readers), terrible themes that are difficult to customize — all of this has me searching for a new blog system.

I am considering copying some of my favorite posts to a new blog (the domain name will remain the same) and archiving the rest of the site.

I’ll let you know before I do anything drastic.

Modifying Blog Theme

I have been changing the theme of this blog a lot this week.

I’m trying to make it look good on phones and tablets, which meant ditching the sidebar.

I’m also trying to adhere to good accessibility practices. The structure of the pages is good. I ran it through a couple of checkers. I was displeased with the color of the links. While I like this theme, I think clickable links should either be a different color from the rest of the text, or be underlined, or both. Themes these days are so damned complicated – they are hard to modify.

But anyway, I made all the links on the blog underlined. I’ll probably change their color too.

There I did it.

No email notifications for a while…

I was fiddling with this blog the other day and deactivated Jetpack briefly. Jetpack is the plugin that runs the email notifications for new posts, and collects stats. I turned it off because I no longer wish to see stats.

Now Jetpack will not reconnect.

For a non-coder I’m pretty good at this stuff, but damned if I can get it to work.

Honestly, I probably should keep it removed. I don’t like them tracking my website through the plugin. They might…you know…discover all the secrets I’m publishing publicly here.

The ability to do a free email newsletter summery of a blog is BUILT IN to micro.blog . I have considered moving this whole blog to that system. Actually I’ve tried it, but the blog is approaching 1000 posts, and lots of images and files, and micro.blog choked on it. I think the formatting of the WordPress site is just slightly not friendly to MB. I will try it again.

Anyway, if you are reading this and would normally have gotten it via email, this is the reason. There are about 23 of you.

I’m likely going to just keep Jetpack uninstalled. I really only want the email list if I can still get it, but with only 23 people subscribed it might be easier to just to start over.

I really recommend you use an RSS app, like Reeder or NetNewsWire to keep up with this and other blogs.

No tracking code

Today I removed the tracking code from this and all my other sites.

I removed Google Analytics well over a year ago, and replaced it with Fathom Analytics, a pay service that strives to act ethically.

I removed the Fathom code today. I decided it is dumb to collect stats on a blog like this. If some is interested enough they will comment. Or email me. That’s all I need.

Thanksgiving 2024

We had a good Thanksgiving. Watched MST3K all day, read, took the dog on an excellent walk on the long leash up at the local university. Had an excellent dinner.

Sheltie dog posing like a model in front of a pool at the local university. Riley – you can’t take a bad picture of him