If the most useful thing I achieve this Bank Holiday Monday will have been to make it easier to post short geotagged notes from my mobile to my blog (and Mastodon), it will have been a success.
This has been a test post. Feel free to ignore it.
OMG VaultPress Jetpack Backup to the rescue.
One of the best Internet people drew me a picture and when I replied to it, it got scrambled. 😱
But even though I had to modify core WordPress columns to store drawings, the backup respected that and I was able to restore it.
I used to pay for VaultPress. Nowadays I get it for free as one of the many awesome perks of my job. But I’d probably still pay for it because it’s a lifesaver.
This post is also available as a podcast. Listen here, download for later, or subscribe wherever you consume podcasts.
Observant readers might have noticed that some of my recent blog posts – like the one about special roads, my idea for pressure-cooking tea, and the one looking at the history of window tax in two countries1 – are also available as podcast.
Like my occasional video content, this isn’t designed to replace any of my blogging: it’s just a different medium for those that might prefer it.
For some stories, I guess that audio might be a better way to find out what I’ve been thinking about. Just like how the vlog version of my post about my favourite video game Easter Egg might be preferable because video as a medium is better suited to demonstrating a computer game, perhaps audio’s the right medium for some of the things I write about, too?
But as much as not, it’s just a continuation of my efforts to explore different media over which a WordPress blog can be delivered2. Also, y’know, my ongoing effort to do what I’m bad at in the hope that I might get better at a wider diversity of skills.
Let’s start by understanding what a “podcast” actually is. It is, in essence, just an RSS feed (something you might have heard me talk about before…) with audio enclosures – basically, “attachments” – on each item. The idea was spearheaded by Dave Winer back in 2001 as a way of subscribing to rich media like audio or videos in such a way that slow Internet connections could pre-download content so you didn’t have to wait for it to buffer.3
Here’s what I had to do to add podcasting capability to my theme:
I use a post tag, dancast, to represent posts with accompanying podcast content4.
This way, I can add all the podcast-specific metadata only if the user requests the feed of that tag, and leave my regular feeds untampered . This means that you don’t
get the podcast enclosures in the regular subscription; that might not be what everybody would want, but it suits me to serve podcasts only to people who explicitly ask for
them.
It also means that I’m able to use a template, tag-dancast.php, in my theme to generate a customised page for listing podcast episodes.
Okay, onto the code (which I’ve open-sourced over here). I’ve use a series of standard WordPress hooks to add the functionality I need. The important bits are:
RSS
Spotify
Pocket Casts
Apple Podcasts
YouTuberss2_item – to add the <enclosure>, <itunes:duration>, <itunes:image>, and
<itunes:explicit> elements to the feed, when requesting a feed with my nominated tag. Only <enclosure> is strictly required, but appeasing Apple
Podcasts is worthwhile too. These are lifted directly from the post metadata.
the_excerpt_rss – I have another piece of post metadata in which I can add a description of the podcast (in practice, a list of chapter times); this hook
swaps out the existing excerpt for my custom one in podcast feeds.
rss_enclosure – some podcast syndication platforms and players can’t cope with RSS feeds in which an item has multiple enclosures, so as a
safety precaution I strip out any enclosures that WordPress has already added (e.g. the featured image).
the_content_feed – my RSS feed usually contains the full text of every post, because I don’t like feeds that try to force you to go to the
original web page5
and I don’t want to impose that on others. But for the podcast feed, the text content of the post is somewhat redundant so I drop it.
rss2_ns – of critical importance of course is adding the relevant namespaces to your XML declaration. I use the itunes namespace, which provides the widest compatibility for specifying metadata, but I also use the
newer podcast namespace, which has growing compatibility and provides some modern features, most of which I don’t
use except specifying a license. There’s no harm in supporting both.
rss2_head – here’s where I put in the metadata for the podcast as a whole: license, category, type, and so on. Some of these fields are
effectively essential for best support.
You’re welcome, of course, to lift any of all of the code for your own purposes. WordPress makes a perfectly reasonable platform for podcasting-alongside-blogging, in my experience.
Finally, there’s the question of what to podcast about.
My intention is to use podcasting as an alternative medium to my traditional blog posts. But not every blog post is suitable for conversion into a podcast! Ones that rely on images (like my post about dithering) aren’t a great choice. Ones that have lots of code that you might like to copy-and-paste are especially unsuitable.
Also: sometimes I just can’t be bothered. It’s already some level of effort to write a blog post; it’s like an extra 25% effort on top of that to record, edit, and upload a podcast version of it.
That’s not nothing, so I’ve tended to reserve podcasts for blog posts that I think have a sort-of eccentric “general interest” vibe to them. When I learn something new and feel the need to write a thousand words about it… that’s the kind of content that makes it into a podcast episode.
Which is why I’ve been calling the endeavour “a podcast nobody asked for, about things only Dan Q cares about”. I’m capable of getting nerdsniped easily and can quickly find my way down a rabbit hole of learning. My podcast is, I guess, just a way of sharing my passion for trivial deep dives with the rest of the world.
My episodes are probably shorter than most podcasts: my longest so far is around fifteen minutes, but my shortest is only two and a half minutes and most are about seven. They’re meant to be a bite-size alternative to reading a post for people who prefer to put things in their ears than into their eyes.
Anyway: if you’re not listening already, you can subscribe from here or in your favourite podcasting app. Or you can just follow my blog as normal and look for a streamable copy of podcasts at the top of selected posts (like this one!).
1 I’ve also retroactively recorded a few older ones. Have a look/listen!
2 As well as Web-based non-textual content like audio (podcasts) and video (vlogs), my blog is wholly or partially available over a variety of more-exotic protocols: did you find me yet on Gemini (gemini://danq.me/), Spartan (spartan://danq.me/), Gopher (gopher://danq.me/), and even Finger
(finger://danq.me/, or run e.g. finger blog@danq.me from your command line)? Most of these are powered by my very own tool CapsulePress, and I’m itching to try a few more… how about a WordPress blog that’s accessible over FTP, NNTP, or DNS? I’m not even kidding when I say
I’ve got ideas for these…
3 Nowadays, we have specialised media decoder co-processors which reduce the size of media files. But more-importantly, today’s high-speed always-on Internet connections mean that you probably rarely need to make a conscious choice between streaming or downloading.
4 I actually intended to change the tag to podcast when I went-live,
but then I forgot, and now I can’t be bothered to change it. It’s only for my convenience, after all!
5 I’m very grateful that my favourite feed reader makes it possible to, for example, use a CSS selector to specify the page content it should pre-download for you! It means I get to spend more time in my feed reader.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
…
Runners will talk about how much they enjoy the feeling of wind in their hair. Boxers won’t shut up about the grace and art of their profession. Even soccer players can be moved to wax poetical about how enjoyable it is to be part of a truly great game.
But all golfers ever talk about is how little golf they hope to play. A typical pre-match interview will go something like this:
Some guy in a blazer: Great to have you here with us, what are your goals for the first round this morning.
Golfer: Well today I hope to play as little golf as possible. Mathematically speaking the course could be done in 18 shots but that is probably physically impossible. But ideally as close to 18 as I can get. Any additional golf is bad.
Blazer: What is your strategy for avoiding the golf.
Golfer: I have a guy who follows me around to help share the burden of all this damn golf. He is going to help me out by suggesting ways to avoid playing any more golf than we have to. Of course, I pay him but his real motivation is to bring this sorry excuse for a pastime to the speediest conclusion.
Blazer: Better you than me, but good luck out there.
…
Why must a blog comment be text? Why could it not be… a drawing?1
I started hacking about and playing with a few ideas and now, on selected posts including this one, you can draw me a comment instead of typing one.
I opened the feature, experimentally (in a post available only to RSS subscribers2) the other week, but now you get a go! Also, I’ve open-sourced the whole thing, in case you want to pick it apart.
What are you waiting for: scroll down, and draw me a comment!
1 I totally know the reasons that a blog comment shouldn’t be a drawing; I’m not completely oblivious. Firstly, it’s less-expressive: words are versatile and you can do a lot with them. Secondly, it’s higher-bandwidth: images take up more space, take longer to transmit, and that effect compounds when – like me – you’re tracking animation data too. But the single biggest reason, and I can’t stress this enough, is… the penises. If you invite people to draw pictures on your blog, you’re gonna see a lot of penises. Short penises, long penises, fat penises, thin penises. Penises of every shape and size. Some erect and some flacid. Some intact and some circumcised. Some with hairy balls and some shaved. Many of them urinating or ejaculating. Maybe even a few with smiley faces. And short of some kind of image-categorisation AI thing, you can’t realistically run an anti-spam tool to detect hand-drawn penises.
2 I’ve copied a few of my favourites of their drawings below. Don’t forget to subscribe if you want early access to any weird shit I make.
In anticipation of WWW Day on 1 August, some work colleagues and I were sharing pictures of the first (or early) websites we worked on. I was pleased to be able to pull out a screenshot of how my blog looked back in 1999!
Because I’m such a digital preservationist, many of those ancient posts are still available on my blog, so I also shared a photo of me browsing the same content on my blog as it is today, side-by-side with that 25+-year-old screenshot.1
Update: This photo eventually appeared on a LinkedIn post on Automattic’s profile.
This inspired me to make a toggleable “alternate theme” for my blog: 1999 Mode.
Switch to it, and you’ll see a modern reinterpretation of my late-1990s blog theme, featuring:
img { image-rendering: crisp-edges; } to try to compensate for modern browsers’ capability for subpixel rendering when rescaling images: let them
eat pixels!5
I’ve added 1999 Mode to my April Fools gags so, like this year, if you happen to visit my site on or around 1 April, there’s a change you’ll see it in 1999 mode anyway. What fun!
I think there’s a possible future blog post about Web design challenges of the 1990s. Things like: what it the user agent doesn’t support images? What if it supports GIFs, but not animated ones (some browsers would just show the first frame, so you’d want to choose your first frame appropriately)? How do I ensure that people see the right content if they skip my frameset? Which browser-specific features can I safely use, and where do I need a fallback6? Will this work well on all resolutions down to 640×480 (minus browser chrome)? And so on.
Any interest in that particular rabbit hole of digital history?
1 Some of the addresses have changed, but from Summer 2003 onwards I’ve had a solid chain of redirects in place to try to keep content available via whatever address it was at. Because Cool URIs Don’t Change. This occasionally turns out to be useful!
2 Actually, the entire theme is just a CSS change, so no tables are added. But I’ve tried to make it look like I’m using tables for layout, because that (and spacer GIFs) were all we had back in the day.
3 Obviously the title saying “Dan Q” is modern, because that wasn’t even my name back then, but this is more a reimagining of how my site would have looked if I were transported back to 1999 and made to do it all again.
4 I was slightly obsessed for a couple of years in the late 90s with flaming text on black marble backgrounds. The hit counter in my screenshot above – with numbers on fire – was one I made, not a third-party one; and because mine was the only one of my friends’ hosts that would let me run CGIs, my Perl script powered the hit counters for most of my friends’ sites too.
5 I considered, but couldn’t be bothered, implementing an SVG CSS filter: to posterize my images down to 8-bit colour, for that real
“I’m on an old graphics card” feel! If anybody’s already implemented such a thing under a license that I can use, let me know and I’ll integrate it!
6 And what about those times where using a fallback might make things worse, like
how Netscape 7 made the <blink><marquee> combination unbearable!
This is my 5,000th post on this blog.
Okay, we’re gonna need a whole lot of caveats on the “this is 5,000” claim:
First, there’s a Ship of Theseus consideration. By “this blog”, I’m referring to what I feel is a continuation (with short breaks) of my personal diary-style writing online from the original “Avatar Diary” on castle.onza.net in the 1990s via “Dan’s Pages” on avangel.com in the 2000s through the relaunch on scatmania.org in 2003 through migrating to danq.me in 2012. If you feel that a change of domain precludes continuation, you might disagree with me. Although you’d be a fool to do so: clearly a blog can change its domain and still be the same blog, right? Back in 2018 I celebrated the 20th anniversary of my first blog post by revisiting how my blog had looked, felt, and changed over the decades, if you’re looking for further reading.
In late 1999 I ran “Cool Thing of the Day (to do at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth)” as a way of staying connected to my friends back in Preston as we all went our separate ways to study. Initially sent out by email, I later maintained a web page with a log of the entries I’d sent out, but the address wasn’t publicly-circulated. I consider this to be a continuation of the Avatar Diary before it and the predecessor to Dan’s Pages on avangel.com after it, but a pedant might argue that because the content wasn’t born as a blog post, perhaps it’s invalid.
Pedants might also bring up the issue of contemporaneity. In 2004 a server fault resulted in the loss of a significant number of 149 blog posts, of which only 85 have been fully-recovered. Some were resurrected from backups as late as 2012, and some didn’t recover their lost images until later still – this one had some content recovered as late as 2017! If you consider the absence of a pre-2004 post until 2012 a sequence-breaker, that’s an issue. It’s theoretically possible, of course, that other old posts might be recovered and injected, and this post might before the 5,001st, 5,002nd, or later post, in terms of chronological post-date. Who knows!
Then there’s the posts injected retroactively. I’ve written software that, since 2018, has ensured that my geocaching logs get syndicated via my blog when I publish them to one of the other logging sites I use, and I retroactively imported all of my previous logs. These never appeared on my blog when they were written: should they count? What about more egregious examples of necroposting, like this post dated long before I ever touched a keyboard? I’m counting them all.
I’m also counting other kinds of less-public content too. Did you know that I sometimes make posts that don’t appear on my front page, and you have to subscribe e.g. by RSS to get them? They have web addresses – although search engines are discouraged from indexing them – and people find them with or without subscribing. Maybe you should subscribe if you haven’t already?
Note that I’m not counting my comments on my own blog, even though many of them are very long, like this 2,700-word exploration of a jigsaw puzzle geocache, or this 1,000-word analogy for cookie theft via cross-site scripting. I’d like to think that for any post that you’d prefer to rule out, given the issues already described, you’d find a comment that could justifiably have been a post in its own right.[/footnote]
Generating a chart...
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Generating a chart...
If this message doesn't go away, the JavaScript that makes this magic work probably isn't doing its job right: please tell Dan so he can fix it.
Let’s take a look at some of those previous milestone posts:
I absolutely count this as the 5,000th post on this blog.
1 Don’t go look at them. Just don’t. I was a teenager.
2 Via a bit of POSSE and a bit of PESOS I do a lot of crossposting (the diagram in that post is a little out-of-date now, though).
3 Bird & Moon, of course, doesn’t have a subscription feed that I’m aware of, but FreshRSS‘s “killer feature” of XPath scraping makes the same kind of thing possible.
Dave Winer kindly let me know about a proposed standard for linking to OPML blogrolls. Given that I added a page containing my blogroll last year, it was easy enough for me to add a tiny bit of code to the header to add support for automatic detection of my blogroll.
<link rel="blogroll" type="text/xml" href="/blogroll.xml" title="Dan Q's blogroll">Now all we need is some tools that can do such detection!
(You’ll note I’ve added a title attribute: as I discovered the other day, some browsers including ELinks will show all
<link>s of unknown rel="..." at the top of the page and I wanted this one to make sense!)
Terence Eden wrote about his recent experience of IndieWebCamp Brighton, in which he mentioned that somebody – probably Jeremy Keith – had said, presumably to provoke discussion:
A blog post doesn’t need a title.
Terence disagrees, saying:
In a literal sense, he was wrong. The HTML specification makes it clear that the
<title>element is mandatory. All documents have title.
But I think that’s an overreach. After all, where is it written that a blog must be presented in HTML?
There are plenty of counter-examples already in existence, of course:
<title>s, of course, so that’s not the strongest counterexample!
But perhaps we can do better…
We’ve looked at plain text, which as a format clearly does not have to have a title. Let’s go one step further and implement it. What we’d need is:
index index.txt; (for Nginx).5
<item> has a <title>!
I’ve implemented it! it’s at textplain.blog.
In the end I decided it’d benefit from being automated as sort-of a basic flat-file CMS, so I wrote it in PHP. All requests are routed by the webserver to the program, which determines whether they’re a request for the homepage, the RSS feed, or a valid individual post, and responds accordingly.
It annoys me that feed
discovery doesn’t work nicely when using a Link: header, at least not in any reader I tried. But apart from that, it seems pretty solid, despite its limitations. Is this,
perhaps, an argument for my .well-known/feeds proposal?
Anyway, I’ve open-sourced the entire thing in case it’s of any use to anybody at all, which is admittedly unlikely! Here’s the code.
1 no-ht.ml technically does use HTML, but the same content could easily be delivered with an appropriate non-HTML MIME type if he’d wanted.
2 Again, I suppose this technically required HTML, even if what was delivered was an empty file!
3 Gemtext is basically Markdown, and doesn’t require a title.
4 Plain text obviously doesn’t require a title.
5 There’s no requirement that default files served by webservers are HTML, although it’s highly-unsual for that not to be the case.
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Molly White writes, more-eloquently than I would’ve, almost-exactly my experience of LLMs and similar modern generative AIs:
…
I, like many others who have experimented with or adopted these products, have found that these tools actually can be pretty useful for some tasks. Though AI companies are prone to making overblown promises that the tools will shortly be able to replace your content writing team or generate feature-length films or develop a video game from scratch, the reality is far more mundane: they are handy in the same way that it might occasionally be useful to delegate some tasks to an inexperienced and sometimes sloppy intern.
…
Very much this.
I’ve experimented with a handful of generative AIs, such as:
Most-recently, I’ve played with music-making AI Suno and… it’s not great.. but like all these others it’s really interesting to experiment with and think about. Here: let me just ask it to write some “vocal trance europop about a woman called Molly; Molly has a robot friend who is pretty good at doing many tasks, but the one thing she’ll never trust the robot to do is write in her blog” –
So yes, like Molly:
It’s still an interesting field to follow-along with. Stuff like Sora from OpenAI and VASA-1 from Microsoft are just scary (the latter seems to have little purpose other than for misinformation-generation3!), but the genie’s out of the bottle now.
1 Visually-distinct tokens adds depth to the world and helps players communicate with one another: “You distract the skinny cultist, and I’ll try to creep up on the ugly one!”
2 I’m going to gloss right over the question of whether or not these tools are capable of creating anything truly original. You know what I mean.
3 Gotta admit though that I laughed like a drain at the Mona Lisa singing along with Anne Hathaway’s Lil’ Wayne Style Paparazzi Rap. If you’ve not seen the thing I’m talking about, go do that now.
In August, I celebrated my blog – with its homepage weighing-in at a total of just 481kb – being admitted to Kev Quirk‘s 512kb club. 512kb club celebrates websites (often personal sites) whose homepage are neither “ultra minimal” or “link pages” but have a total size, including all assets, of under half a megabyte. It’s about making a commitment to a leaner, more-efficient Web.
My relatively-heavyweight homepage only just slipped in under the line. But, feeling inspired perhaps by some performance enhancements I’ve been planning this week at work, I decided to try to shave a little more off:
Here’s what I changed:
loading="lazy".
.ico format (<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/_q23t/icons/favicon-16-32-48-64-128.ico" />), which is pretty
redundant nowadays because all modern browsers (and even IE11) support
.png icons. I was already providing .png and .svg versions, but it turns out that some browsers favour the one with the (harmful?) rel="shortcut icon" over rel="icon" if both are present, and .ico files are –
being based on Windows Bitmaps – horrendously inefficient.
By getting under the 250kb threshold, I’ve jumped up a league from Blue Team to Orange Team, so that’s nice too. I can’t see a meaningful path from where I’m at to Green Team (under 100kb) though, so this level might have to suffice.
This is a reply to a post published elsewhere. Its content might be duplicated as a traditional comment at the original source.
After a first attempt at mobile blogging, I found a process that works better for my work flow.
Throughout the day, I have ideas and need to write them down. This could be a coding process, a thought to remember, the start of a blog post, and more. I love a good notes app. I’ve gone through quite a few and use a few for different things. Lately it’s been Simplenote.
…
As I took part in Bloganuary and began what’ll hopefully become a fifth consecutive year of 100 Days To Offload, I started to hate my approach to mobile blogging and seek something better, too. My blog’s on WordPress, but it’s so highly-customised that I can’t meaningfully use any of the standard apps, and I find the mobile interface too slow and clunky to use over anything less than a great Internet connection… which – living out in the sticks – I don’t routinely have when I’m out and about. So my blogging almost-exclusively takes place at my desktop or laptop.
But your experience of using a notetaking app is reasonably inspiring. I’m almost never away from a “real” computer for more than a day, so there’s no reason I can’t simply write into such an app, let it sync, and copy-paste into a blog post (and make any tweaks) when I’m sitting at a proper keyboard! I’m using Obsidian for notetaking, and it Syncthing‘s to my other computers, so I should absolutely be leveraging that. I already have an Obsidian folder full of “blog post ideas”… why shouldn’t I just write blog posts there.
Thanks for the inspiration!
The ever-excellent Kev Quirk in 2020 came up with this challenge: write a blog post on each of 100 consecutive days. He called it #100DaysToOffload, in nominal reference to the “100 days of code” challenge. I was reflecting upon this as I reach this, my 36th consecutive day of blogging and my longest ever “daily streak” (itself a spin-off of my attempt at Bloganuary this year), and my 48th post of the year so far.
Might I meet that challenge? Maybe. But it turns out it’s easier than I thought because Kev revised the rules to require only 100 posts in a calendar year (or any other 365-day period, but I’m not going to start thinking about the maths of that).
That’s not only much more-achievable… I’ve probably already achieved it! Let’s knock out some SQL to check how many posts I made each year:
SELECT YEAR(wp_posts.post_date_gmt) yyyy, COUNT(wp_posts.ID) total FROM wp_posts WHERE wp_posts.post_status='publish' AND wp_posts.post_type='post' GROUP BY yyyy ORDER BY yyyy
A big question in some years is what counts as a post. Kev’s definition is quite liberal and includes basically-everything, but I wonder if mine shouldn’t perhaps be stricter. For example:
| Year | Posts | Success? | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1998 | 7 | ❌ No | Some posts are lost from 1998/1999. If they were recovered I might have made 100 posts in 1999, but probably not in 1998 as I only started blogging on 27 September 1998. |
| 1999 | 66 | ❌ No | |
| 2000 | 2 | ❌ No | |
| 2001 | 11 | ❌ No | |
| 2002 | 5 | ❌ No | |
| 2003 | 189 | 🏆 Yes | Achieved 1 September, with a post about an article on The Register about timewasting. Or, if we allow reposts, three days earlier with a repost about Claire's car being claimed by the sea. |
| 2004 | 374 | 🏆 Yes | An early win on 20 April, with a made-up Chez Geek card. Or if we allow reposts, two days earlier with thoughts on a confusing pro-life (???) website. |
| 2005 | 381 | 🏆 Yes | In a highly-productive year of blogging, achieved on 7 April with a post about enjoy curry and public information films with friends. If we allow bookmarks (I was highly-active on del.icio.us at the time!), achieved even earlier on 18 February with some links to curious websites. |
| 2006 | 206 | 🏆 Yes | On 21 July, I shared a personality test (which was actually my effort to repeat an experiment in using Barnum-Forer statements) - I didn't initially give away that I was the author of the "test". Non-pedants will agree I achieved the goal earlier, on 19 June, with my thoughts on a programming language for a hypothetical infinitely-fast computer. |
| 2007 | 166 | 🏆 Yes | Achieved on 2 July with thoughts on films I'd watched and board games I'd played recently. Or arguably 12 days earlier with Claire's birthday trip to Manchester. |
| 2008 | 86 | ❌ No | |
| 2009 | 79 | ❌ No | |
| 2010 |
159
(84 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | A heartfelt post about saying goodbye to Aberystwyth as I moved to Oxford on 16 June was my 100th of the year. Pedants might argue that this year shouldn't count, but so long as you're willing to count checkins (and you should) then it would... and my qualifying post would have come only a couple of days later, with a post about the Headington Shark, which I had just moved-in near to. |
| 2011 | 177 | 🏆 Yes | Reached the goal on 28 October when I wrote about mild successes in my enquiries with the Office of National Statistics about ensuring that information about polyamorous households was accurately recorded. Or if we earlier on 9 June with a visual gag about REM lyrics if you accept all my geocache logs as posts too (and again: you should). |
| 2012 |
133
(91 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My 100th post of the year came on 28 August when I wrote about launching a bus named after my recently-deceased father. You have to be willing to accept both checkins and reposts as posts to allow this year to count. |
| 2013 |
151
(72 for pedants) |
😓 Probably not | I'm not convined this low-blogging year should count: a clear majority of the posts were geocaching logs, and they weren't always even that verbose (consider this candidate for 100th post of 2013, from 1 October). |
| 2014 |
335
(22 for pedants) |
🙁 Not really | Another geocache log heavy, conventional blogpost light year that I'm not convinced should count, evem if the obvious candidate for 100th post would be 18 May's cool article about geocaching like Batman! |
| 2015 |
205
(18 for pedants) |
🙁 Not really | Still no, for the same reasons as above. |
| 2016 |
163
(37 for pedants) |
🙁 Not really | |
| 2017 |
301
(42 for pedants) |
🙁 Not really | |
| 2018 |
547
(87 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | I maintain that checkins should count, even when they're PESOS'd from geocaching sites, so long as they don't make up a majority of the qualifying posts in a year. In which case this year should qualify, with the 100th post being my visit to this well-hidden London pub while on my way to a conference. |
| 2019 |
387
(86 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | Similarly this year, when on 15 August I visited a GNSS calibration point in the San Francisco Bay Area... on the way to another conference! |
| 2020 |
221
(64 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | Barely made it this year (ignoring reposts, of which I did lots), with my 21 December article about a little-known (and under-supported) way to inject CSS using HTTP headers, which I later used to make a web page for which View Souce showed nothing. |
| 2021 |
190
(57 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | A cycle to a nearby geocache was the checkin that made the 100th post of this year, on 27 August. |
| 2022 |
168
(55 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My efforts to check up on one of my own geocaches on 7 September scored the qualifying spot. |
| 2023 |
164
(86 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | My blogging ramped up again this year, and on 24 August I shared a motivational poster with a funny twist, plus a pun at the intersection between my sexuality and my preferred mode of transport. |
| 2024 | 436 | 🏆 Yes | Writing at full-tilt, my hundredth post came when I found a geocache near Regents Canal, but pedants who disregard reposts and checkins might instead count my excitement at the Ladybird Web browser as the record-breaker. This year also saw me write my 5,000th post on this blog! Wowza! |
| 2025 |
136
(91 for pedants) |
✅ Yes* | |
| Total | 5,450 |
Total count of all the posts.
Doesn't add up? Not all posts feature in one of the years above! |
* Pedants might claim this year was not a success for the reasons described above. Make your own mind up.
In any case, I’d argue that I clearly achieved the revised version of the challenge on certainly six, probably fourteen, arguably (depending on how you count posts) as many as nineteen different years since I started blogging in 1998. My least-controversial claims would be:
Given all these unanswered questions, I’m not going to just go ahead and raise a PR against the Hall of Fame! Instead, I’ll leave it to Kev to decide whether I’m (a) eligible to claim a 14-time award, (b) merely eligible for a 4-time award for the years following the challenge starting, or (c) ineligible to claim success until I intentionally post 100 times in a year (in, at current rates, another two months…). Over to you, Kev…
Update: Kev’s agreed that I can claim the most-recent four of them, so I raised a PR.
Well that was Bloganuary! It was pressuring, exhausting, and – mostly! – fun. Let’s recap what I wrote about each day of January:
So yeah: 31 posts in as many days! Actually, it was closer to 40, because on a couple of days I wrote non-Bloganuary posts too:
Generating a chart...
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Of course, with the addition of this post, it’s now 32+ posts in 32 days. As I’ve noted before, this is my longest daily streak in over 25 years of blogging… and I’m genuinely a little curious how much longer I can keep it up. There are lots of things I meant to write about last month but simply didn’t have time: if I dusted off a few of those ideas I could push on a few days longer. My longest unstreak or “dry spell” – the longest number of consecutive days I’ve gone without making a post – is 42 days: could I beat that? That’d be a special level of personal best.
I initially aimed to fuel and inspire my blogging at the start of this year in a more-interpersonal way, by making some pen pals and writing about the experience of that. Except I ran slightly late with my first (and haven’t written it up yet) and even later with my second (on account of winter blues plus spending any spare “blogging” time doing Bloganuary) so that project’s already way off track. Still aiming to catch-up though.
But I’m pleased to have been able to throw out 20,000 words of prompt-driven blog posts too, even if some of the prompts were weaker than others!
This post is part of my attempt at Bloganuary 2024. Today’s prompt is:
What do you enjoy doing most in your leisure time?
Boo to this prompt! This Bloganuary already asked me how I like to play and about five things I do for fun; now it wants me to choose the thing I “enjoy most” from, presumably, that same set.
So I’m going to ignore this prompt.1 Instead, let’s go look up last year’s prompt from the same day:2
What is a song or poem that speaks to you and why?
Much better.
Landslide, by Fleetwood Mac.
At 5½ years older than me, the song’s been in my life effectively forever. But its themes of love and loss, overcoming naivety, growing up and moving on… have grown in significance to and with me as I’ve grown older. And to hear Stevie Nicks speak about it, it feels like it has for her as well, which just doubles the feeling it creates of timeless relevance.
In concert, Nicks would often dedicate the song to her father, which lead to all manner of speculation about the lyrics being about the importance of family. And there’s definitely an undertone of that in there: when in 2015 she confirmed that it was about a challenging moment of decision in her youth in which she was torn between continuing to try to “make it” as a musical act with her then-partner Lindsey Buckingham or return to education. Her father was apparently supportive of either option but favoured the latter.
Ultimately she chose the former and it worked out well for her career… although of course the pair’s romantic relationship eventually collapsed. And so the song’s lyrics, originally about indecision, grow into a new interpretation: one of sliding doors moments, of “what ifs”. In some parallel universe Stevie Nicks dropped out of Buckingham Nicks before Keith Olsen introduced Lindsey Buckingham to Mick Fleetwood, and we’d probably never have heard Landslide.3
Stevie still sings Landslide in concert, and now it feels like it’s entered its third life and lends itself a whole new interpretation. Those lyrics about turning around and looking back, which were originally about reconsidering the choices you made in your youth and the path you’d set yourself on, take on a whole new dimension when sung by somebody as they grow through their 60s and into their 70s!
In particular, coming to the song as a parent4 is a whole other thing. Its thoughts on innocence and growing-up, and watching your children do so, reminds me of my perpetual struggle with comparing myself to the best parent I know. An intergenerational effort to be my best me; to look forwards with courage and backwards with compassion for myself.
All of which is pretty awesome for a song that under other circumstances might be just a catchy twist on a classic country rock chord progression with some good singing. Sliding doors, eh?
1 It’s my damn blog; I can do what I want.
2 This is my first year doing Bloganuary, so I didn’t get to answer this prompt last time around.
3 Nor, for that matter, any of the other excellent songs that came out of Nicks’ and Buckingham’s strained relationship, such as Silver Springs, Second Hand News and, perhaps most-famously, Go Your Own Way. I guess sometimes you need the sad times to make the best art.
4 Nicks, of course, famously isn’t a parent, but I refer you to a 2001 interview in which she said “No children, no husband. My particular mission maybe wasn’t to be a mom and a wife. Maybe my particular mission was to write songs to make moms and wives feel better.”.