Tag: website
October 1, 2024 / Website

Something Useful

I just installed the “On This Day” feature in the Archives and decided to click on one of the results as a test and I was amused by what I wrote on this same day two years ago:

Am I doing something useful or am I avoiding something that is intellectually more difficult?

I am not an archivist.
But I want to curate my notes and articles.

I am not making notes for legal documents.
Just for me.

For 99.99% of my notes, lists, notebooks, drafts, files… done is better than perfect.

If I can reliably find my notes and figure out later on what I meant when I wrote it, that’s all I need.

– https://chrisdenbow.website/archives/22055

Times have changed, because now, for me, the sole purpose of this website is to be a repository for my thoughts and I am in fact, a curator. An archivist.

October 1, 2024 / Thinking

On This Day

I just wrote and deployed a script to display “On This Day” for any/all of my previous articles on that given day. It can be found in the Archives section. When there is a day in the previous years I did not post, the script will read: “Nothing has ever happened on this day. Ever.“

However, I was fairly busy on October 1st in the past according to this screenshot. 
September 30, 2024 / Journal

A New Look, A Fresh Start

Introduction:
After some thoughtful redesign, I’ve transformed this site into a space where my writing, thoughts, and more can live in a more organized environment. This redesign reflects my vision of creating a central hub for my work.

Why I Redesigned the Site (again):
Having a home site that feels like ‘me’ is essential. I wanted to craft a place that resonates with the tone and depth of my work—something aesthetically pleasing yet functional. This redesign allows me to streamline how I present my content, making it easier for readers to dive in and explore.

What’s New:

Theme: I chose a new theme that gives the site a clean, minimalist feel. I want the focus on words, and not distractions.

Font and Color: The new typography1 and color2 highlights evoke the tone I want to set—professional yet approachable, and a little bit whimsical. The colors are meant to be inviting and soft on the eyes, perfect for long reads.

Pages: I’ve reorganized the structure of the site. You’ll now find dedicated pages for my current projects, thoughts, and more. You’ll find these on the navigation bar at the top of this website. If you are reading this on a mobile device, then they would be listed under Menu.

The Details

  • About + Contact is the new self-introduction home page. Re-written for my evolving style and professionalism. Everything else is accessible by the menu above it.
  • Archives are the place to go for quickly accessing decades of writing. Search bar, category search, tag search and search by year is available.
  • Colophon explains how this website is designed.

The Work

I’ve re-organized and re-titled these pages for specific actions.

  • Photographing – a brief page with a blurb about my hobby and a link to the off-site portfolio
  • Reading – formerly known as “The Library.” A curated page to document my literary explorations. Eventually, I will add other reading sources I enjoy besides books.
  • Talking – formerly known as “Podcasts.” It is the home of the Radio Denbow podcast. Eventually, I’ll add quick audio thoughts. In regard to thoughts…
  • Thinking – formerly known as “Micro” or “Notebook.” This will capture my quick thoughts in short-form writing.
  • Writing– formerly known as the Home page. This is where to go for my long-form posts. The main repository for my musings.

Looking Ahead:
For now, I am done. Overall, the redesign meets my needs and refocuses on specific criteria that is more categorized and easily accessible. Any more features will be on the backend, such as site performance and streamlining code.

I appreciate you taking the time to visit this website and continue to read the web log. 
You can support me in many ways such as contributing to the conversation in the posts, adding me to your RSS feed readers, or, I can be reached via electronic mail by clicking here: @hello

Footnotes:

  1. Inter Font ↩︎
  2. #00c7ca ↩︎
September 19, 2024 / Journal

Send To Print

Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.

– Carol Burnett

The first 35 of 3,287 pages to print this website are complete, hole-punched and placed lovingly in a three-ring binder for safekeeping.

Right away, I noticed there are formatting issues such as a small blurb of an article takes up only 10% of the page. Wasted space. I had to discard of three blank pieces of paper as a result.

So re-formatting, or allowing the printer to cover both sides of the page, for example could help save space, ink and money.

As first-run test print, I am pleased to see a small portion of my written words on a black and white paper as opposed to a screen.

September 17, 2024 / Thoughts

Print Error

I attempted to print a few pages from the Archives .pdf last night at the library. It would not accept the 485MB file. I didn’t want to print all of it but the printer didn’t give me a chance to tell it which pages to print. Need a better solution.

September 9, 2024 / Journal

3,287

That’s how many pages I need to print from 24 years worth of writing on this website. Printing them from the library and over time may be my best bet I think. Let them worry about the paper and ink costs.

September 9, 2024 / Website

Podcast Page

As a follow-up to my previous post, I realized that my audio file host had removed the embedded code and URL link from my Podcast page here on this site. Not very nice!

So I have uploaded the audio files, all 10.5 episodes, back to the Podcast page for posterity. In addition, I now have the files on my server for safekeeping.

Podcast Page Screenshot

I own my publishing house. This website, my own e-mail, the domain name, file servers, etc. I’ve learned the hard way not to trust third party anything.

September 4, 2024 / Journal

A Look Back

Once again, I find myself working behind the scenes of this website. This time, I am organizing the backend, the stuff that no one else sees. I am also wrapping up the migration of writings from my previous sites into here for posterity. Such as it is.

It’s been fun to look back and see the previous designs of this site in all of its iterations. I’ve learned a lot, experimented quite a bit, and still have a ways to go. Nowadays, I care more about substance than style and will make an effort to keep the experiments to a minimum. Until then, here are a few screenshots of this site through the years. I wish I could have done the same during the early years.

March 2011
May 2012
September 3, 2024 / Journal

Back In Time

With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.

The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.

I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.

August 31, 2024 / BlAugust

The WayBack Machine

Have you heard about the Internet Archive? I have but somehow always forget that it is available. It is a library of books, software, music, websites and more. A perfect blend of old and new knowledge. This is truly a national treasure.

Did I mention websites? It’s true- the WayBack Machine deploys spiders across the world wide web to take snapshots of websites. They send them out everywhere and my old websites were caught at least two times a month. This is how I discovered a problem with my own personal archives.

There are missing records.

I verified this when I searched the Archives Page on my own site. From September 2013 until November 2017, FOUR YEARS of my writing cannot be found.

Screenshot of this site way back in 2014. None of that is on my site currently. Aargh!

I did a cursory search on one of my hard drives just for the year 2015 that turned up 37,000 results, none of them were my writings. I’ll need to check the rest but for now I am bummed. No idea what happened but hope I can find them, post them, back them up online and in print.

July 24, 2024 / Website

Backlinks?

I just discovered that my blog editor now has back-linking capabilities.

Huh.

July 2, 2024 / Technology

HTML

I am in a mood again. Thinking about keeping this website online as a private online archive while at the same time, writing to the journal inside my own offline database.

If I do take this private, it’ll be a stripped down HTML-only version.

Stay tuned.

June 8, 2024 / Journal

Reset

Sure, the domain name is the same but the platform and the design are all new. The previous Ghost server was very proprietary and will not allow an easy way to export all of my writings there. Nor would it allow me to import decades worth of work into it. So, it had to go away even though I am taking a lo$$ on it. Because why write there when I cannot export?

I have imported the archives here from the previous years but not all of it. I still need to cut/paste from the former platform onto here. Grr.

This site design is a fresh, minimal look and inspired by the Mercedes F1 team colors.

This website is not complete and it will take a few days for everything to be up to my standards.

In the meantime, welcome! Have a look around. Let me know what you think in the comments after each post or from the “About” page.

May 28, 2024 / Journal

Why

Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.
May 28, 2024 / Journal

Why?

Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.