Tag: Technology (page 1 of 3)

Writing about tech issues by a self-confessed neo-Luddite.

Eksell WordPress theme

It feels like I only changed the WordPress theme for this site a week ago. But I’m doing it all over again today, by installing an early version of the Eksell WordPress theme by Anders Norén.

To be fair to myself, the last time I switched themes was back in September 2019, when I opted for Chaplin, another stellar theme by Anders Norén.

At the time, I claimed I made that switch because of the number of spam emails I was getting from WordPress developers offering to redesign my site. In reality, those emails haven’ stopped, and I guess they never will.

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New front page, liveblogging feature added

Well, despite the seemingly unending flow of posts about Camp Davey it’s been pretty busy around here lately.

In the Intramanet industry we talk about the back end and the front end. While you’ve no doubt been entertained by the travails of Scaramouche, the D/DN boffins have been tinkering away behind the scenes to ensure that you experience the very best of Davey’s international web portal.

That’s why, if you visit the main page, you’ll notice that we’ve implemented a redesign—less is more, after all. Not that anybody ever gets here via the front page, anyway. It’s like a bloody speakeasy in here sometimes—people just waltzing in via the back door, and then wandering off to whichever part of the house they feel like. But, we guess that’s okay, as long as people don’t hang around too long, or leave their mess behind.

But speaking of mess, how tragic that Scaramouche has finally been evicted from Camp Davey? As disheartening as the whole episode was for us, we were also very grateful to be able to liveblog events as they happened, in real time. This was all due to the aforementioned boffins, who installed and configured a copy of Liveblog, a WordPress liveblogging plugin. The plugin itself hasn’t been updated for a while but it still managed to do the trick.

Finally, given the large number of posts on D/DN, and the continuing scourge of link rot, we continue to work behind the scenes to edit, clean up and rejuvenate various posts. However, as there are over 1200 posts to deal with, our efforts are pretty piecemeal, meaning that the quality of the posts varies quite a lot. But we’re hoping that by beginning to assign posts to various authors, and revamping the category taxonomy, we’ll be well on the way to a more streamlined site.

Thanks again for visiting Davey Dreamnation, and stay safe out there.

New site theme: ‘Chaplin’

Ever since I installed my contact form, I’ve received a barrage of emails from web designers offering to fix this website.

Every time, I say: “Yeah, you’re right. I need to fix it. But I’m what’s known in the industry as a compulsive theme changer. I’m not ready to change my website theme just now. I’ve actually gone three months without changing anything. You could say I’m in remission.”

Obviously, when I say ‘say’, I mean ‘think’ and ‘to myself’.

But yesterday I finally cracked. The latest email mercilessly dissecting my website, its lack of a responsive mobile theme in particular, sent me over the edge.

So, instead of contacting that web developer and asking them to re-do my site (which would probably be an eminently good investment of their time and my money) I switched to another free WordPress theme.

It’s called Chaplin, and was created by my favourite WordPress theme designer, Anders Norén.

Let’s see how many more fricking emails I get now.

Pimpin’ my portfolio

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.

I originally used 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.

Since switching to the Chaplin theme, I’ve resigned myself to using Jetpack to display portfolio posts instead.

In any case, I’ve now come up with a new Portfolio 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 Portfolio page will also feature other non-poetry projects and more recent books. More on that in due course!

Clearing out the linkrot

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.