wordpress

📅 Daily note for 28 June 2024

I’m back! First daily note in a while. Hope you are as pleased with me as I am 😁

The blog has been rehosted, meaning I can save a bit of money shutting down an old hosting account. Have also changed the theme, going from the venerable Twenty-Fifteen⬈ which has served me well for a long old while.

I’ve gone for GeneratePress⬈, which is a very bare-bones (the idea being that you can customise it to do whatever you like). I’m just tweaking it here and there to keep things light and simple. I’ve avoided blog-tinkering for a while, but it’s quite nice to change things up.

I’ve tried to trim down the number of RSS feeds I am checking on the regular in NetNewsWire⬈. Am subscribed to over 400 but huge numbers of those are inactive these days, and others I rarely check. So, have split them into two folders, Must reads and Nice to reads. The latter stays shut unless I’m desperate for something to look at!

Eddie Copeland posted an interesting aside⬈ on language and how he isn’t using the word digital much, and it seems to be working for him. Fair enough! I’m a bit horses-for-courses on this one really, sometimes it can be a helpful word, sometimes not. Depends on the organisation’s context I guess.

When I do say ‘digital’ these days though, I invariably follow it up by saying that it is a simple shorthand for technology, data, and online experience.

I love this quote from Matt King in his post the future of digital is already here⬈:

Working in public sector digital environments can often involve an almost disorientating sense of deja-vu, where a chance phrase drops you deep into a flashback to the previous times you had a similar conversation. When this first happens, it’s tempting to think that you’re getting old, and that either that the organisation you’re working with has ignored the last 15 years, or that the case for digital change is doomed. The reality is usually that none of these things apart from the getting old bit is true, and that the organisation you’re dealing with is both ahead of the curve in a few places and has missed some stuff in other places. The future of digital is not very evenly distributed at the moment – it’s pretty bumpy – but what we’ll see in the next 15 years is that distribution improving.

Going down to London and speaking at the Town Hall 2030 launch on Tuesday was pretty exhausting but also inspiring. I love the fact that the lens for quite a few big beast policy types is now on local public service delivery.

With the likely new government on its way, it feels like a very optimistic time, which is a very nice feeling to have. I came away with many thoughts that I will try and wrangle into posts in the near future.

Does this actually work? #

🧑‍💻 Movements

I have rehosted this blog, which seems to have worked ok. Well, if you’re reading this, it must have!

One side effect is that anyone subscribed to the RSS feed may well have suddenly received a bunch of old posts popping up as a result. Just mark ’em as read and move on, there’s nothing new to see there!

I’ve switched the theme as well, for the first time in many years. Not sure what direction I’m going in with it all yet though – plenty of tinkering ahead!

WordPress and email

I’ve been moving a few of the sites that I manage away from a simple shared hosting arrangement onto something a bit more proper, with Steph’s advice (this blog, being incredibly simple albeit with a fairly hefty archive going back to 2004 or something, remains on the shared hosting for now). The new ‘platform’ is made up of using SpinupWP to manage the setup of the servers and WordPress itself, which is all hosted on DigitalOcean, with all the benefits that come from having this kind of control over the environment.

One area that has been causing me some worry is around sending emails out of these sites. The emails that WordPress sends, like password resets etc, can be a bit flakey in getting delivered at the best of times, but to make it more complicated, SpinupWP doesn’t install a means of sending emails itself, you have to configure your own, using an email sending provider like Amazon SES or Mailgun. It sounds complicated – and it is, in a way – but there are plugins and things to make it easier.

I’ve played with a few ways of doing it, but think I have settled on one, that I will now move all the sites onto over time. I’m going to be using the WP Mail SMTP plugin to get everything set up and working, and linking it up with SendLayer to do the actual emailing. When setting these things up, you need a domain to use, and each one needs configuring in SendLayer. To make life easier for myself, I have registered a specific domain to use for this, and so emails will come from sitename@davesemaildomain.notreal, which hopefully will keep things simple.

Daily note for 7 September 2023

Chunky update as I haven’t published for a couple of days. Was in the office in Lambeth yesterday.

Whoever designed the file sharing permissions in Microsoft 365 should probably go and find some other purpose in life.

Postmarks looks interesting. Like a single-user but federated del.icio.us style bookmarking site.

Steph and I migrated LocalGov.blog away from the shared hosting it was on to something a bit more robust and scalable (Digital Ocean, via SpinupWP). It was a bit fraught at times as WordPress multisite can be a cranky beast, and there were the usual frustrations waiting for DNS changes to propagate and so on. But we got there!

Remember, if you need a site hosting for something, and it’s vaguely local government related, you can ask for it to be set up on LocalGov.blog. Just drop me a line!

Runnymede – from Magna Carta to simplified public services – interesting stuff, feels like a vendor driven piece – maybe? – but subtle about it.

Improving the SEND local offer – always impressive to see Stockport blogging away about the work they are doing. I don’t think I know anyone there, need to fix that.

I newslettered yesterday – “Continuing a recent theme here, I was at the weekend mulling over the – perfectly correct – narrative that ‘technology isn’t the most important thing’. To my mind, this has unfortunately been interpreted by many as ‘technology doesn’t matter at all’, which has left many organisations in a bit of a pickle.”

What do you mean you don’t want to use Audacity in the browser?

Couple of great videos from Russell Davies on presenting:

Daily note for 30 August 2023

I wrote a post about simple things for leadership types to bear in mind when thinking about technology.

WordPress for Enterprise looks a very useful guide. Strange it’s a PDF though and not also available as web pages (although as Steph mentioned to me, PDFs are very ‘enterprise’).

What is inclusive design and why is it important? “‘Inclusive design’ and ‘accessibility’ are often used interchangeably, but they are different things.”

Load more posts!