Tag: wordpress

  • 33

    33

    And here I am… 33 now.

    While I have don’t have any major goals or plans for this year, it’s fun to have some “it’ll be cool if it happened, but I won’t be disappointed if it didn’t”

    I am having a more relaxed birthday this year.
    Last year, I was in London for the Final Fantasy XIV Fan Festival. I had an amazing time and met some cool people, including a friend who I have not met in the 12 years of knowing each other.

    Today, I am planning to have lunch with my mother in a restaurant and discuss something that we are planning together. A holiday!

    My mother is an Irish mammy as they come. She has been outside of Ireland to go to Spain a handful of times (Ibiza and Tenerife mainly)
    The last time, that I was on one of those holidays was to Ibiza, and that was in 2008!

    It wouldn’t be until 2016/17 that my mother and father went on another holiday, and that was with my half-brother and sister. I didn’t go on that trip.

    Since my father’s death and the pandemic, I have moved back home to be with my mother. We initially spoke about a weekend trip to mainland Europe (either Amsterdam or Germany) but those plans fell through.

    We never really spoke about going on a holiday since it fell through… Until last week, my mother was watching This Morning. They had Jeff Brazier in New York City, highlighting the city and some of its landmarks.

    My mother started talking about it more and more. After a couple of days, I blurted out: “How about we go to New York, then?”
    She hasn’t stopped smiling. She is really looking forward to going. We’re planning to go in February so we have time to plan things out and more importantly, get our passports renewed.

    This wouldn’t be my first time in NYC. I was there with a friend in 2018, and while I enjoyed my time then, there is much more I wanted to see and do, and now I have a perfect chance to do it this time with my mother.

    We are adamant on actually committing to this. Once we have 1 element of the holiday booked (Flights and/or hotel), then we are committed.

    And this is the start. I have already said to her, that we should do weekend trips to European cities a thing, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

    Other than that, I would like to lose some weight. I have been a big guy since the pandemic. I am not looking to get a 6-pack or anything, but just lose some of the weight. If I can drop a size or two in trousers while I am at it, that would be cool.

    What about online stuff?

    With the changes that are happening, I am no longer going to be using Twitter. I am not a fan of the changes that Elon has made in the last few weeks regarding the AI and the “blocking”.

    As you all know, I am on the Fediverse (mainly on Mastodon.ie) where I have been since November 2022 and that will continue to be my main place to go to for posting.

    Bluesky has received a surge in users after Twitter was blocked in Brazil and another surge this week regarding the aforementioned AI and blocking changes that were made.

    Check out the footer at the bottom for the links to my profiles.

    I am also available on Telegram or Discord (Just search for crakila) if you want to chat to me on those platforms.

    I have taken a step back on doing projects as I feel I was stressing myself out. So I am cutting down on the amount of websites that I am running, and I am looking to improve the ones that I have and make the existing ones a bit more lively. This would apply to padraig.blog, pf.ie and 39.ie, especially the last one!

    Gaming

    To the shock of no one, I am still playing Final Fantasy XIV, and I will probably be continuing to play it for another year. During some downtime of the game, I have been dabbling in other games, including but not limited to:

    Let’s see how this year goes and let’s hope that my post for 34 looks back at this post, and I am able to reflect on a what a good year that I had!

  • My time with Ghost is at an end…for now!

    My time with Ghost is at an end…for now!

    I have to be very clear from the outset, that I am not referencing the Ghost devices that were seized as part of a multinational raid, but rather the Ghost blogging software.

    I switched to Ghost for a 2nd time back in March 2021 after they released Version 4 and I have been using it quite a bit between then and now.
    I just wanted a simple way to blog without having to deal with plugins. The editor was quite powerful and it was a great experience,

    So why did I change?

    In the more recent updates, Ghost has been adding features to the editor that would help with linking posts to old post and edit images directly on the website. But I couldn’t. The linking of old posts feature was breaking with no helpful warning, so I hoped that the next versions would help [They didn’t] and their image editing tools were made available for free for Ghost Pro subscribers but not for people that are self-hosting.

    And that is another thing… Ghost really don’t want you self-hosting the software for Production. They do not provide support for self-hosting installs, and that is a disappointing factor that I had to deal with, and was the ultimate reason for changing.

    So here I am. Back on WordPress.

    I did ask on Mastodon if there were alternatives to try out.

    I really wanted to try WriteFreely, but no matter what I did… I couldn’t get it to work at all. I probably didn’t have any patience to troubleshoot it. I will revisit this one day and try and get it working.

    I was advised to check out ClassicPress. While it is cool in theory and would probably work for certain setups, it was not for me. Thankfully, I was able to convert the work that I did on ClassicPress to WordPress via a Manual Update and everything has been working great.

    I am not a fan of Gutenberg, but I put some time and effort in and managed to re-create the home page and the posts pages to be very similar to my Ghost site.

    padraig.blog on Ghost
    padraig.blog on WordPress

    You may see references to “signing up for a newsletter”. No one signed up. And that’s OK.
    This blog is a hobby and I do not rely on it to pay my bills at the end of the day!

    I am using 8 plugins on this WordPress site, and at the moment, I wouldn’t need any more to (mostly) re-create the experience that I had in Ghost.

    • ActivityPub – This one was given. While Ghost are actively working on ActivityPub, (which I appreciate), I have my fears that it would only be available to their Pro users and will provide Zero support to people on self-hosting.
      • You can now follow this blog, either put the URL for this site, or @padraig@padraig.blog into the search of your Fediverse client, and you can see when I release a new blog post!
    • Connect Matomo – This is for website analytics. I switched from Google Analytics to a self-hosted Matomo install in 2022. This was done when I no longer wanted to be shackled into Google’s ecosystem.
    • Instant Images – I love Unsplash and I have used them quite extensively on this blog over the years and I do not plan on changing this. It also has support for Openverse, Pixabay and Pexels.
    • Shortcorder – I used ‘Snippets’ in Ghost which was like canned text. It is used for the footer of my posts.
    • Spectra – This is a plugin that gives you access to more blocks for Gutenberg. It is mainly used on the home page for the posts layout. I try to use WordPress’ own blocks where possible.
    • WP Dark Mode – If users want it, there is a 🌙moon at the bottom of the page that will switch it to a Dark Mode.
    • Redis Object Cache & WP Super Cache – For object and page caching, respectively.

    The new WordPress site is only a few days old, and I am still tweaking it to my liking!

    If you have suggestions on how I can improve the look, feel, functionality of the site, please let me know on the Fediverse.