Doors to manual

The three weeks since my last 'weekly' update here on Scribbles have been fairly deterministic.  In this scribble I'm going to provide a 'final' update on migrating my web presence from micro.blog to Kirby CMS, about a fateful 3 weeks in Burnley FC's season, and about problems that I'm having in my own fitness regime.  I'll wrap up by talking about my plans for the rest of the year now that my site migration is complete.

Website Migration

When I last wrote three weeks ago I still had around 800 microposts and snaps (photos) to reformat and import into my site, which was still sat on a staging subdomain, and I had key pieces of functionality still on a Wishlist.

We spent the weekend of 19th April camping in our motorhome at Hayfield in the Peak District.  Before the weekend was out all 900 posts had been either imported or discarded, and I had migrated the build on to the main domain, putting it live at lee-perry.co.uk.

I still had some pretty important (to me) functionality left to build.  In my previous article I talked about the potential in Robb Knight's echofeed plugin, but I also talked about preferring to integrate directly into the Fediverse.  Consolidating subscriptions was also a factor in the move - this would add one (albeit a very cost-effective one).  In addition to this I also needed to setup redirects for my content.

After putting my site live, I reviewed Tinylytics, identifying all posts that had received more than about 10 views in the previous year, creating redirects for my most popular content using the Retour plugin by Nico Hoffman.  In theory you can link content to redirects within retour - but in practice it is much faster to enter static links for a library the size of mine.

The one thing that I felt that I would miss from micro.blog was the integration of comments from the timeline and from the fediverse, into the site.  Though that had also been a source of frustration - visitors could only comment on a post with a micro.blog account, or through the fediverse.  Thats still an incredibly small pool of people.  Almost nobody enquiring how to install Championship Manager 01/02 is going to have a Mastodon account, fewer still micro.blog.

So probably the parts of the site that I am most proud of are the elements that allow visitors (or readers elsewhere) to interact with the content.  This is possible using three Kirby plugins, all produced by Maurice Renck.  I had already installed the page rating plugin last time around, which allows readers to provide thumbs-up and thumbs-down to content.  Since then I have installed the Kommento and indieConnector plugins that allow readers to comment directly on the content on site, and to integrate comments, boosts and likes from across the Fediverse to that system.  That means that comments, likes, and boosts are consolidated together on the page.

In the shot above, following Burnley's magnificent 1-4 victory over Sheffield United, shows comments from a friend on Mastodon, along with the echoed boost, and a number of likes.  This was not straightforward, and I would not have got the webmention functionality working without the support of the developer.  The post direct to Mastodon setup was simple in comparison.

I still have a bit of work to do - for now I still have a large number of redirects to enter, and in the future I want to apply my '1987' theme to the design.  I also want to program my 'route' template so that it dynamically produces a list of activities and performance data completed on that route.

Football

Over the course of April, after a truly miserable season, Burnley allowed us to dream of survival with victory at Sheffield United, and a very strong draw at Manchester United.  I could not get a ticket for the United game, so instead headed over to watch Accrington Stanley conclude an up down season with a good 4 - 1 victory over Tranmere Rovers - discovering in the process that Andy Holt has put his pie prices through the roof.

It all went to pot in May though.  A dreadful 1 - 4 defeat to Newcastle United on Star Wars Day means that only victory away to Tottenham Hotspur this weekend, and at home to Nottingham Forest can secure safety, and only then if Nottingham Forest lose their intervening game, Luton do not win either of their final two games, and the Premier League do not give Forest any of their deducted points back.  Given that I do not see us beating Tottenham, it feels likely that we will be relegated on the penultimate weekend of the season.  at times it has been so bad, it is difficult to believe that we made it so far.

I'm off to cheer myself up in Bolton's play-off second leg with Barnsley tomorrow night.

Fitness

Is going really badly, my hip and back pain from earlier in the year is firmly back this weekend.  I'm trying to get in to see the Doctor this week, I'm worried that I might have arthritis in the joint... with that in mind I've dropped intensity to Z1/Z2, and upped cadence to avoid grinding from the hip.

Plans

On that happy note, turning to the future.

I'm still hopeful that I'll be able to race effectively at the Great North Run in October, for now I'll be focussing on keeping workout intensity low and increasing volume on the bike - hopefully driving weight loss.  Will start thinking about GNR more when I can walk pain free consistently.

Finally, now I do not have a huge website migration project consuming my spare time, and the football season is coming to an end, what on earth will I do with my spare time?

I've been given access to the v2 beta for Scrimba, so I'm planning on spending the rest of the year making my way through that, and once it is complete I'll start making my way through the courses within the TalkPython library that interest me.  

Enough for one evening.... until the next time.