Blogging

I’ve recently relaunched this website, and this blog more generally. I’ve taken the opportunity to clean up a lot of things, including switching the primary generation of the static content to Hugo from Jekyll. The primary advantage of Hugo is speed; the site now generates a lot faster. However, it’s also a bit more featureful and cleaner. It’s inbuilt templating allowed me to stop using the somewhat dated and awkward m4. I’ve also taken the opportunity to clean up my URLs, and improve the visuals of the site. So far, I’m pretty happy with it!

Recently I relaunched this blog on andrewferrier.com. This was for several reasons:

• I wanted to get away from Wordpress. I’d been beholden to it as a tool for a little too long, and it’s become somewhat heavyweight, and was also exposing andrewferrier.com to a lot of spam. By removing a database backend and the ability to add comments, this should go.

• I wanted to give a refreshed look and feel. I’ve redesigned everything from scratch using Bootstrap. The look and feel is still a work in progress, but I now get the chance to play with everything from scratch rather than worry about Wordpress themes.

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Tip for anyone who blogs and uses Google Reader:  the new ‘Discover’ feature of Google Reader enables you to see how many people are subscribed to your blog. Select ‘Browse’ and search for your blog using keywords. When you’ve found it, it’ll show how many subscribers there are. Take the number with a pinch of salt: it is, of course, only one of many blog readers, albeit a popular one.

I’ve been getting a lot of spam comments on my blog recently, which even Akismet isn’t catching.

So I was amused to get this comment today:

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments , I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site....

I think you can see where it’s going. One can’t help but feel that just maybe he knows a lot of spammers and knows I get a lot of spammy comments because he is a [fill in the obvious blank]. How frustrating.

Of recent months, the frequency of posts on this blog has declined from a peak of about two a day to once every few weeks. This is primarily because I’ve realised that such a high posting frequency isn’t sustainable, and it isn’t giving me the ROI I’d hoped for. Combined with some personal projects I’ve been working on in the past week or two, I simply don’t have the time to write all the articles I want to. I hope my writing is still interesting to my friends, family, and strangers - but it has become, and probably will remain, more sporadic than it once was. This blog isn’t going anywhere, and I’ll continue to post - it might just not be as often as it used to be. I hope you continue to enjoy it.

I’m heading off to San José this weekend to take part in an IBM Redbook Residency. I’ve never contributed to a Redbook before, and by all accounts it’s an intense experience. I’m hoping to take some time out to see the Bay Area, but I probably won’t be writing here very frequently - I’ll be using this mainly to chronicle tales of the California sunshine. I hope to get back to writing for real when I return in mid-March.

I recently installed the Subscribe to Comments plugin on this blog. However, it seems to have attracted far too much spam. I’ve therefore disabled it again until a version is developed that’s a bit more hardy against spammers. You can always subscribe to an RSS feed for the comments on any post (as you can with any Wordpress-powered blog) by appending /feed to the permalink URL for that post.

This blog has now moved to my new domain andrewferrier.com. You shouldn’t notice any change if you are using a web browser or a well-designed feedreader to read it, as all parts of the old blog (including permalinks, RSS feed, etc.) should permanently redirect to the new one. You might just want to check that your RSS reader is pointing to the new blog though, or alter your browser bookmarks. The redirection will disappear in a few months. I’d appreciate it if you can let me know if you see any problems with the new blog.

I’m not sure what the blogosphere-approved name for it is, but I had my first truly negative comment on this blog the other day. I’m not quite sure why the author chose to leave it, but he’s right in a roundabout way: I do like holding the market to account, like any amateur economist.

To that end, here’s a positive story: if you’re looking for a letting agent in or around the Winchester area, I can’t recommend the Winchester Letting Company highly enough. They’ve been superb from day one: helpful and friendly. The two problems I’ve had so far with my flat have been resolved in less than 12 hours, including when my boiler broke this morning and they resolved it before lunchtime. They charge no ongoing fees, and are generally all-round helpful folks. If you’re looking to rent somewhere round here, give them a try.

I’ve been away for the past few days, so haven’t had a chance to write recently. Normal service will be resumed soon. In the meantime, happy Christmas!