Archive — page 6
Posted on 18 September, 2023
As I wrote previously I've decided to move this site off BlueHost (for both hosting and domain registration) and as part of the move will need to also move away from using WordPress.
I decided that I wanted to use Eleventy as my static site generator — I like it's simplicity and flexibility, and for this site there's not going to be any complicated or reactive interfaces that would push me towards using React (and therefore Gatsby).
The setup is quite simple:
- a homepage that has the most recent post "in full" and then a digest of the next three posts
- the main blog (which I've termed "the archive") — with four posts to a page, shortened to a digest if they're too long
- a link to my "dashboard"
- an about page
For wider screens I want the content to be split into a main 'content' column and a narrower side-column that contains a 'tag cloud'; the tags need to be auto-generated, and each of them needs to link to an auto-generated page with a list of all the tagged posts.
... morePosted on 17 August, 2023
Having recently set up the Dolwen Solutions website, which is costing an entire £10 per year to run, I though it was worth seeing how much it costs to run this site.
BlueHost Costs
The answer — BlueHost is charging me nearly £250 per year. For that I get:
- domain registration
- hosting (up to three sites and some very healthy usage that I don't need)
- WordPress install for the site
- emails related to my domain
There's an option for a cheaper package that doesn't include the three sites (that I don't need), but that would still be somewhere close to £200 per year.
Another Way
An alternative solution:
... morePosted on 09 July, 2023
I posted a couple of months ago about the LSERSA website and a booking system for their weekly training sessions that I was working on.
It's taken a little longer than I'd hoped, but pleased to say that the booking element is now up and running. It's quite a lot more complicated (dare I say sophisticated?) than the similar system that I previously wrote for the Bowles Ski Racing Club ...
Needlessly complicated, or simply sophisticated?
Key features that this new system includes:
... morePosted on 25 June, 2023
A (long) while ago I wrote about my browser homepage project (built with Eleventy). I've continued developing it, occasionally adding or removing a panel, ever since, and every now-and-then I have a hack at the underlying code to improve performance.
There`s more content than there used to be!
One of the things that I've always found a little tricky to deal with is trying not to make too many
API requests when developing locally — the concern being that I develop by running Eleventy in
--serve mode, and by default it tries to completely refresh all API data every time any file is updated.
In the past I've gotten around this by using a .env variable, checking it's value (or existence) in
each API query, and serving pre-written dummy data if so. But that leads to very messy code, and means
that if an API changes (or goes offline) you don't get any warning in your local development setup
— the first you hear of it is when the errors start flowing from Netlify.
