Just little notes to myself about trivial things.
After spending so much time redesigning this website and beginning the long and arduous task of sorting through over 1,000 posts, it’s suddenly been around two months since I last added anything new here!
Where did those two months go?
This is not a rhetorical question, by the way: I genuinely don’t know where they went.
Given that I’ve lived in Sweden since 2011, now is probably as good a time as any to acknowledge this fact by creating a Swedish version of my biography.
In addition, given that my chapbook Övergången (2011) contains 10 poems in English and Swedish, I’ve created new posts for the Swedish translations, all of which are listed on the På svenska page.
Thanks once again to Linda Bönström and Boel Schenlaer for providing the translations back in 2011.
I’ve also created a post for my poem ‘Fem kronor’, which is so far the only poem I’ve managed to write in Swedish all on my own, and which originally appeared in my digital chapbook Fem Kronor (2013).
In other Swedish-related news, I’ve recently re-started working on Åsa Strålande in Tantolunden, a novel-in-progress set in Stockholm. While my language skills are definitely basic, I’ve decided to persevere with the original idea of writing the majority of the dialogue in Swedish.
Hmm, time to re-enrol in SFI?
Now that the messy task of fixing the broken links on this website is, temporarily at least, over and done with, I’ve been working on a better way to present the various books, theses, websites and projects that I’ve either produced or been involved with over the years.
Using the Portfolio Post Type plugin, which creates a custom post taxonomy for portfolio items, and the Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg plugin, which makes it easier to create fancy-looking blocks on pages and posts, I’ve come up with a new Works page, which simply lists all of my portfolio items.
At this stage I’m mostly concentrating on my poetry publications prior to 2014. For each work, I’ve tried to provide some contextual information, metadata, links and a PDF download.
In cases where I’m not able to provide a download—for example, my two full-length poetry collections were only published in print, and are both now out of print—I guess I’ll need to come up with some other solution.
Eventually the Works page will also feature other non-poetry projects and more recent books. More on that in due course!
It stands to reason that a medium as subject to change as the Internet will, over time, exhibit signs of decay.
In the case of a website that amalgamates posts from at least five other sites, and which has been online in one form or another since 2001, this decay manifests itself via linkrot, defined as ‘the process by which hyperlinks on individual websites or the Internet in general tend to point to web pages, servers or other resources that have become permanently unavailable.’
In other words, I’ve spent the past day or three checking, repairing and/or deleting broken links on this site.
The whole exercise makes me feel cleansed, as if I’ve dropped an HTML bath bomb into a gigantic pool of code.
Let’s see how long that feeling lasts.
No-one can read this post, or indeed the rest of this website, at the moment, but that’s because I’ve done some rearranging of the site and its contents.
First off, I’ve disabled WordPress Multisite (which had allowed me to host three blogs on the current domain) and merged and reposted most of the content which was replicated across the main, DDN Books and DNRC Records sites.
I’ve also, therefore, republished virtually everything that was previously in draft form. There’s obviously much more work to be done cleaning up old posts (as ever) but posting everything makes it much easier to spot the posts that still contain old shortcodes or HTML formatting.
Second, I’ve installed MediaWiki and have managed to get the [d/dn] wiki up and running. Much more on this exciting development shortly.
Third, to celebrate, I’ve switched over to the wonderful Editor WordPress theme … now, to write a new post or two.