Truly, the life of the amateur, cargo-cult coder, can be a vale of tears.

There’s a little program I use to keep a vague eye on how many people are looking at my websites. It is called Bise and is actually rather lovely because it gives a bird’s eye view without going into useless detail and without tracking anything. The big drawback is that it is written in Perl, a language I know little about. Still, by assiduous use of magic incantations, I have had it working nicely for a couple of years. Occasionally, however, something somewhere gets updated and error messages appear.

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I’ve been watching, with some amusement, the goings on at Twitter and wondering what, if anything, I should do. I’m skeptical that the whole thing is going to implode, although I am not nearly as sanguine that it will not become even worse than it currently is. To an extent, I cannot avoid the mayhem, because a social channel that I like and enjoy has an automatic import of any tweet that contains the word “IndieWeb,” as a result of which one of the rooms is swamped with people whispering into the void that people can follow them on Mastodon at something-something@indieweb.social. I skim past them at a rate of knots, just in case there is something of actual interest that I don’t want to miss.

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Having just taken delivery of a stonkingly beautiful new MacBook Air I face two big decisions.

Drafts, or Not?

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Get the Alfred Workflow

I write these posts in Byword, and they come to you via the Grav CMS. Each post has a front section that tells Grav how to deal with it. Straight quotes — " and ' — are needed there to enclose certain items. Curly (aka smart or typographical) quotes — “” ‘’ — in the front section break everything. Obviously I know how to type smart quotes, but it is extra work and luckily Byword has a switch that will ensure that all quotes are either straight or curly. The problem is, I often forget to flip that switch, so everything breaks. Pain.

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A friend who is completely technologically unable and a great painter asked me to help him create a website. Having cleaned up his various content files, a few days ago I made a start on the presentation, and heavy going it was too. Although he really wants only a very simple site, I began by trying to simplify an extremely powerful, all-singing, all-dancing framework. It was incredibly difficult, with bits of markup being injected from who knows where and doing who knows what. Very frustrating indeed, to the point where I was beginning to regret having agreed to do it.

Then I had a revelation.

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