One nice thing about switching from WordPress to Eleventy is that I start with a blank slate. By this I don’t mean that I start with nothing, because Eleventy does a lot. What I mean by this is that I can use APIs and other tools with greater ease than if I was experimenting with WordPress....
Posts tagged “learning”
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Experimenting With Eleventy — Mar 23, 2026 -
Yet Another Sunny Day — Aug 27, 2021As I looked straight down from a bridge today I noticed that the river is so low that the river bed has become bone dry in places. In other places you see that the gress is turning yellow. When tractors tend to the fields you see that they are stirring up clouds of dust. It is so dry, so often, that it is only a matter of time before forest fires burn down local forests.... -
Working Towards a Goal — Feb 19, 2023I am currently working towards a goal and I am struggling. I am struggling to stay focused when I follow online courses because I find that my mind strays. I am also struggling because the topic is so broad that there are hundreds of things you can learn but you need to be focused.... -
With A view of the Mont Blanc — Sep 24, 2021I’m afraid to open the veluxes because of the threat of finding yet another large spider. I don’t mind having to dispose of it, but I hate the idea of having one walking around without me knowing. A great alternative to open windows is to go for your daily walk. You’re far from neighbours, from smokers, from metalworking and more. You are free to daydream. Today the Mont Blanc was clearly visible. The image is at max zoom with an iphone 8+.... -
Using Duolingo daily — May 15, 2019Duolingo is a mobile phone app that allows you to learn a number of languages whenever you have a few minutes. In so doing you can learn several minutes at a time, when commuting for example, or you can learn as a focused 20 minute session....
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Updating Old HTML Webpages — Apr 29, 2023Most websites are simple. They have five to ten pages at most but usually a single page is enough. Most pages are about one specific thing, whether it’s a CV inspired page to find new clients or a simple page with a few products. Most are usually about a single topic.... -
Trying To Read Nested Data From a JSON File — Jan 14, 2022Over the last two evenings I have been attempting to read nested data. I have tried to parse the data and other methods but without success. I have browsed the web to try to find solutions but for now I am getting stuck. Learning is also about trial and error, and knowing where to find the right information. For now I am lost. At the end of this process I will be more self-sufficient....
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Trying Out Drupal — Jul 5, 2007I’ve just spent at least two hours playing around with drupal. I was working on bit by bit and actually had a case where I had to RTFM. Over the past few hours, I was trying to understand why I couldn’t place the blocks where I wanted. Finally, I found out. I had forgotten to upload the themes folder therefore no content was uploaded. It’s a Content management system, developed so that people may contribute new content without the hassle of uploading HTML files. I’ve used a few but this is the best implementation so far. So far my impressions are good. I’m running version 5.1 of Drupal, the most recent one. It’s got quite a good number of features and looks really flexible so I may have quite a bit of fun with it. At the moment drupal is not available for direct viewing by people visiting my page but as I get it to behave as I want it to I may bring it forward. As a result, I may finally bring my website into the web 2.0 world. It will be database driven from this point forward rather than static pages as it had been till then. I’m happy with it. Time to continue playing with it....
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Reviewing EcmaScript 6 — Jan 10, 2022Recently I have spent time focusing on JavaScript and EcmaScript to make sure that I understand it. By now it is over a year ago since I felt that I wanted to study Angular but felt that I didn’t have enough knowledge to resolve the challenges so I decided to return to basics. My return to basics involved a number of courses and books but it also led me to study this Linkedin Learning Pathway. It is easy to study, get a certiciate and move on, especially for extroverts or outgoing people who find interacting with people easy.... -
Playing with WP Rig — Sep 12, 2021Today I started following the “Building Progressive Themes with WP Rig.” course on Linkedin Learning.... -
Playing with the Hugo With An Old Site — Jun 1, 2023For a few days I have been playing with Hugo with Markdown and HTML pages. It says that it is “the world’s fastest framework for building websites” and so far I do notice that it has a key strength that I like.... -
Playing With Pelican - A Static Blog Website — May 23, 2023When looking at Codeberg as a European alternative to github I came across mentions of Pelican, a static blog generator. Yesterday I spent several hours setting it up and playing. Whilst playing with it I saw some opportunities.... -
Playing With AI — Jun 27, 2023Playing with AI and Learning to Keep It Simple, Silly...
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On Whether I Prefer Vanilla JavaScript or Frameworks? — Mar 3, 2022Today someone on twitter asked this question, and rather than be reply: 320 of 10,000, I chose to write a blog post about it. The TLDR answer is Vanilla JS because if you learn how it works without the help of a framework you understand the language. This doesn’t mean that I don’t have an interest in learning to take full advantage of frameworks.... -
Objectified - A Design Documentary Split Into Individual Interviews. — Feb 14, 2020Objectified is a documentary about industrial design that has been divided into interviews with individuals about a diversity of designs, from the casing of the Mac Book Pro to chairs, a CD player that behaves like a fan and much more....
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My AI Teacher — Jun 24, 2023Today I want to discuss something different. I want to discuss using AI as a teacher, rather than as a tool to replace us. For a few days I have been playing with the Instagram json file that I got when I requested my archive. With this json file I thought about things to do, and in so doing asked chatGPT for help, and it provided answers.... -
Linkedin Learning — Oct 14, 2019Summary...
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Learning To Code By Building CMSs — Aug 2, 2020It’s easy to use Facebook or other CMS every day without thinking about how the code works. This summer I have coded two CMS using Linkedin Learning. One of these CMS was running with PHP and MySQL and the other was running with Ruby On Rails and MySQL.... -
Learning By Writing despite GPT — Jan 30, 2023I am old enough to remember a teacher writing on a board or piece of plastic for an overhead projector. "Why don’t you just give us photocopies of what you’re writing instead of asking us to copy down what you’re writing. “Because you will remember it better if you write it down.”... -
Learning and Consolidation — Dec 10, 2022Learning and Consolidation are important to me. Over a year ago I wanted to learn Laravel and Angular but when I started to study them I felt lost. I felt that I didn’t understand the topics well enough. I went back to the basics. I followed several courses about JavaScript and how it works. I typed out all of the lesson codes, and debugged it until it worked. Some bugs took three or four hours to fix, but eventually I got there... -
Learning About Laravel and PHP — Nov 25, 2022Today I started to follow a course where someone turns a static html page into a Laravel blog. I experimented with home.blade and one or two other features and I got two pages to load, and the login to work, without more than that.... -
Laravel and Context — Jan 24, 2023There is value in studying Laravel and context. By this I mean that over a year ago I wanted to study Angular but after feeling lost in Javascript I decided to take a step back, to study JavaScript. I studied two or more courses over a period of months. I could have followed a single course and claimed that I knew and understood JavaScript but that would have been misleading.... -
Hugo and Wordpress — Jun 29, 2023Transitioning from WordPress to Hugo...
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Experimenting With Hugo As A Blog — Jun 24, 2023Converting This Blog To Hugo...
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Conservation and PHP — Nov 22, 2022Today I have struggled with PHP. I struggled because I want to recreate the same table using loops with PHP as I did formatting with HTML. If I wasn’t up for a challenge I would let PHP loops format it according the default and I’d be done. In the end I did get the table to display as I wanted but not using for loops. I created a table page, laid it out using the data file I’ve been using for this section, and then using include to add that content where I wanted it to be on the page....
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Close to Success - Exporting Instagram images to WordPress Natively — Jun 2, 2020When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.... -
Books I Am Reading. — Feb 26, 2020I usually read several books at a time. This is because I start books but find that my interest is drawn to another topic. As these are usually factual books I can afford to take a break from one book and return to it later.... -
Become A JavaScript Developer Completed and GeoJSON — Feb 4, 2022We’re in a pandemic, and it makes sense to invest time in learning. I completed the Become a JavaScript Developer course last night and today I played around with some code to see if it worked for what I wanted. It didn’t. I also listened to a live stream which discussed geojson, smapshot and other projects. I like the idea of geotagged data, and an open API to allow for the data to be shared more easily... -
An SVG clock — Dec 18, 2021Sometimes we experiment and play with technology. The clock below is an SVG clock using SVG and Canvas technology to display local time. Doing it with these two technologies was easier than with JavaScript. The code doesn’t require calculating thousandths of a second like another clock I tried. The tutorial to make this clock is here: W3 Canvas Clock.... -
A Desire to Dump WordPress — Jun 17, 2023In theory WordPress is a fantastic tool to write a blog, without needing to learn to code. In practice I am tired of WordPress and I have been tired of WordPress ever since they started to use blocks, and ever since I noticed that it uses React.... -
On the Euphoria of Setting Up Activitypub With Gemini — Mar 20, 2026I have spent many hours, and got Gemini to hallucinate multiple times, through multiple chats, attempting to get my Eleventy blogging experiment to talk with Activitypub and the Fediverse with limited help.Setting p a webfinger was easy, but getting follows to be accepted, and for posts to show up has been a complex task....
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The Importance of Trying AI — Sep 18, 2025From what I see the aim of AI companies is not to provide human beings with great tools to speed up work flows, to automate menial tasks, and to enhance our daily work lives. It is to replace us. For this reason I don’t like that there is so much hype about AI.... -
The Inclusivity of Empathy in Group Activities — Aug 18, 2025I love to hike fast. I also love to walk fast. When I am hiking I love to hike my own hike, and then wait for people at regular intervals, so that they may catch up, rest a little, and then continue.... -
Swisscom MyAI as tutor — Mar 28, 2025Yesterday I asked MyAI by Swisscom, which is still in Beta, if it could help me write a JavaScript app to generate passwords and it did, with ease. It provided me with the javascript code I needed so I could cut and paste it, and then use node to run it straight from terminal.... -
The Growing Desire to Self-Host — Dec 10, 2024As Wordpress grows and as my comfort with Hugo increases I question whether to move my blog from Infomaniak to being self-hosted on a Pi. I know that the Pi is not powerful but my site doesn’t get much traffic so I don’t think that it will be overwhelmed with traffic.... -
The End of my Exposed Host Experiment — Oct 1, 2024For months I have been hosting Immich, Photoprism and AudioBookShelf and the experiment has been a success. It has been stable and reliable so far and I did not detect anyone accessing my server without permission....
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A Move from Self-Hosting on a Pi5 8gb to a Pi5 4gb — Jun 22, 2024Yesterday I started moving from a Pi5 8gb to a Pi5 4gb to self-host Audiobookshelf, Photoprism and Immich. I want to move from Ubuntu Desktop to ubuntu server to lower the head room required. When I checked I was using 3.9gb out of 8gb of ram. On the Pi5 4gb running the various services I was using 1gb of ram, but that’s without photos, videos and various audio files.... -
Playing With Computers — May 23, 2024There are two types of computer users in the world. Those that use them for what they need to use them for, and those that play with computers. In the 90s an English teacher was frustrated by the grammatically incorrect “playing with computers” because for him, and others people play computer games on computers, but do not play “with computers”....
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A Pi5, WordPress and ClasssicPress — May 15, 2024Last night I started to install wordpress on the Pi5 and I got it to work. I then started to install ClassicPress via the ClassicPress switchtoclassicpress plugin and got blocked. I was blocked because in order for WordPress to update plugins, themes and wordpress it needs to have access to itself via FTP. That’s when I stopped for the night....
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NixOS and Darwin - Partial success — Apr 19, 2024Yesterday I experimented with NixOS and Debian. I managed to install NixOS on the Pi4 and I managed to implement several changes to the configuration.nix file before the Pi started to overheat and become much slower. At this point I tried to run Debian and that worked....
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A Big Seasonal Change and NixOS Continued — Apr 18, 2024During the weekend it was warm and beautiful. It was so warm and beautiful that my bag got to 40+ degrees centigrade, with an average of over 30°c. Today as I drove to the shops for food I noticed that the snow line was even lower....
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NixOS on Pi — Apr 17, 2024For a few weeks I have tried to install NixOS on a raspberry Pi without much success. I have finally managed to get NixOS to work with a GUI/Desktop environment. I kept getting stuck at the command prompt but in the end I found a blog post that helped me....
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Listening to Podcasts While Walking — Feb 1, 2024Recently I have been listening to plenty of Late Night Linux podcasts. I like them because they’re half an hour long, the adverts are half way through the show, and in general I don’t feel that they’re filling time to fill one and a half hours of podcast time.... -
The Nicest Pi Setup Yet — Jan 31, 2024There are several types of people. One of them is youtubers that try and fail until they succeed, and then there are people like me, who also try and fail until they succeed. In one case the individual probably gets millions of views, and earns enough to waste hundreds of dollars per video in microtransactions, to people like me who are experimenting with Pis because it’s cheaper, once you know what you’re doing than getting a synology box....
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PhotoPrism self-boot — Jan 21, 2024This morning I made PhotoPrism self-booting. I am not certain that this is the write term so I will specify what I mean. PhotoPrism, when run via docker boots, when we tell it to boot, like any other app on our laptop. This morning, after a little time spent with AI I found the solution....
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The NixOS learning Curve — Jan 17, 2024While walking and listening to podcasts I kept hearing about NixOS and how good it is for instantiating environments over and over again. What I didn’t hear about, so much, is that there is a steep learning curve, to get started with.... -
Experimenting With the Pi5 — Jan 16, 2024The Raspberry Pi 5 is twice as powerful as previous Pis according to various sources. For the last 24 hours I have been using a Pi 5 running Ubuntu and the experience has been good. Despite being a small computer it feels as comfortable as some of the computers I have been using....
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Shifting from Tutorials to Practical Experience — Dec 28, 2023Since getting the Raspberry Pi devices my shift has moved from following tutorial after tutorial to experimenting with setting up a number of server projects fron Home Assistant to Nextcloud to Photoprism and Immich to name a few. In the process I have instantiated and then pulled down plenty of instances before finally deciding to keep certain instances up and running for longer, to see whether I can use them. I also experimented with CUPS and set up a printer/scanner for remote use....
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Playing with Nextcloud Continued — Dec 23, 2023Setting up a drive to be available via Samba is a relatively simple thing to do. The drawback is that you have files that are as organised as the media asset manager. It can be quite chaotic unless you have someone trained as a media asset manager, archivist, or other, to help order photos videos and more. To some degree Nextcloud is just as disorganised, initially.... -
The Subtle Art of Trial and Error — Dec 18, 2023For 40 CHF you can buy a Tapo or Xiaomi webcam and it is almost ready to be used as a webcam. You take it out of the box, plug it in, add an SD card, download the app, pair it with the phone and let the phone connect it to wifi and then it detects motion, can take video, photos and more, with ease. In such an environment it’s easy to forget about what we called “Plug and pray” back in the day.... -
Running Two Pi Holes in Tandem — Dec 14, 2023When walking and listening to the 2.5 Admins I heard about the concept of going from treating servers as pets to treating them as cattle. They discussed the habit of giving servers functional names, rather than emotional ones. The examples were similar to DR-1 for for Disaster Recovery one, prod 1 for production one and related names.... -
Sticking with the Old or Trying New Things — Nov 30, 2023Yesterday I went for a half hour drive to do a favour, but in arriving where I had to do the favour I found that people were deeply focused and did not want to be interrupted so I went for a walk. I didn’t swap to the hiking shoes that were waiting patiently in the car. I wore my “recycled” shoes instead. I eventually regretted this because the ground that was frosty, also had deep puddles of water and I had to walk through them. Two or three times my feet got wet. While getting my feet wet I was also listening to a Linux Podcast, episode 56 of Linux After Dark and they were discussing whether people like to adopt a system and stick with it, or whether they like to experiment and try new things constantly.... -
Thoughts on Masto.host — Nov 3, 2023For up to three months I was running my own instance via Masto.host and the experience was good. Setting up an instance is easy. Within a few minutes you can set up your own instance, post and perform administrative tasks such as accept trending hashtags and more....
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Books I Am Reading — Oct 30, 2023According to Goodreads I am currently reading 97 books but in reality I am reading between three to five books consistently at the moment. I read several books at once because it gives me time to absorb ideas from one book whilst reading a second book, and then a third, and so on....
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Playing with Cleaning Robots — Oct 25, 2023Roomba have been around for a long time. Every time I have the opportunity to experiment and learn from a roomba robot I do. I tell it to start vacuuming and then I watch as it explores room after room, gets jammed on a chair leg, a drying thing or even under certain toilets. I also watch with frustration as it throws a bit of dirt too far, and drives by it over and over, and doesn’t pick it up....
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Learning by Trial And Error — Aug 22, 2023Every day or two I see people post about how the Fediverse should be simplified to welcome new people. It’s a shame. Signing up for a Fediverse server is easy. It’s the same process as for every site. The biggest difference is that you’re signing up for a privately owned, crowd sourced community instance. The instances vary slightly from mastodon to Firefish to ClassicPress to WordPress but at their core they are the same. It’s just the community that changes, but even that can be the same if you migrate from one instance to another.... -
Generating Images with Bing AI — Aug 10, 2023Yesterday I played with Bing Chat, which is Microsoft’s AI engine and I noticed that I could play with generating images. I spent quite a bit of time generating a multitude of images, in part for fun, but also to get a grasp of the limitations of the opportunity presented by software like AI.... -
ClassicPress and the Fediverse - Not Quite Ready — Jul 30, 2023Yesterday I experimented with migrating my blog from WordPress to ClassicPress to see whether ClassicPress plays nicely with the fediverse. It does but there is room for improvement.... -
Conversing With Google Bard — Jul 20, 2023Two days ago I was given access to Google Bard and since then I have been experimenting. The key feature that sets Google Bard apart from ChatGPT is that it can answer questions about what is happening at the moment, rather than before September 2021. By being current you can ask it about yesterday’s news or the upcoming weather for a location, and it will give a useful answer. This is useful for time sensitive questions.... -
A Little Too Experimental — Jul 9, 2023The Fediverse is great because people are experimenting and trying new idea. It’s also great because we can be there through every step of the process. This is also why things could be better....
