fooyah – Page 2 – Fooyah

December 23 2019February 20 2020

Naming Conventions

If you browse this site regularly you may have noticed that the title of the communication doesn’t immediately have a lot to do with the content of that communication. It does, it’s just not obvious.

When I review a film on this site then the title of that communication is the name of that film such as this review of Now You See Me from 2013. There is a page somewhere in the old sites that has reviews of films going back to 2004. There might be stuff mentioned about films in this page which has stuff going back to 2004, I can’t be bothered to read it all.

Some of the cadet camp communications follow a naming convention of using the RAF TLA for the base where I stayed like this one from my first summer camp as a commissioned officer. I used the term BZN for the name of the RAF Station. That way I know I can find the other camps by searching although I think the Cyprus camp was named Via Platres. This was a reference to the name of the village we drove through everyday to get anywhere from Troodos base high in the mountains.

The Lego communications follow the format of Lego XX – Kit Number. The XX stands for the number of the communication of that type. It turns out there have been sixty six communications about the building of Lego sets. The last one is here. I think quite a few cover my building of the bucket wheel extractor a few years ago.

All my album reviews are named Album – Band. This makes a certain amount of sense and along with the movies is probably the only group of communications that is easy to find. Although as I write this I am only up to the P section of the albums by name. I chose to write these alphabetically by album name because I wouldn’t then be writing reviews for twenty AC/Dc albums on the trot. It mixes things up a bit.

The main problem with me trying to be clever about the naming of each communication is that I forget what they were called and end up searching my own website to find what I wrote or thought about a particular thing. This isn’t easy as sometimes I haven’t used the words that I thought I did when writing about that topic. In one communication I reference the Olive Harvest but that doesn’t mean anything unless you have the key to the code.

I’ve basically created a mess with these communications and I love it. It makes things harder to find. I end up seeing stuff I’d forgotten about. It is also slightly click-baity for which I apologise. You see I’ve written something and it won’t be obvious what it is unless it’s in those categories mentioned earlier, I bet you can’t wait to find out what madness lies within.

October 8 2018

Migration

Well, that was a weekend! For some reason I decided to have a go at running my website [this one] from my own NAS drive. I figured this will save me money in the long run? won’t have to rely on GoDaddy who have hosted my website since its inception. I’ve not had any problems with GoDaddy but it’s a bit like car tax. When it comes around to paying for the hosting I just find I’d rather not.

So, I spent many hours staring at my computer screen. The first thing was getting the NAS to run as a web server and get the data out to the world. This took a little while to configure, especially the port forwarding and stuff, but I had done this for my Raspberry Pi and it’s web server so I did have some experience. I installed Webstation on the black box and got it working.

The next thing to do was trying to migrate my website from the GoDaddy servers to the NAS. However, this means running WordPress and that means the following have to be installed on the NAS drive:

Maria Db for the SQL database
Text Editor for getting into those pesky php files
phpMyAdmin to read and mess around with the SQL databases
WordPress

WordPress configured everything to run well and then I followed a web guide which had explained it should be easy to transfer the data with a little knowledge. I have a little knowledge and I think that makes me more dangerous than most! I FTP’d my site to my PC ready for uploading to the NAS drive.

I then tried importing the SQL database and setting up WordPress to read that database and work properly.

I failed at this about three times.

I failed terribly. To the point of uninstalling WordPress and deleting all the data and trying again. Each attempt took about an hour. It was quite frustrating because I do think I was close and only needed to change a “space” or “comma” in one of the php files and it would have worked wonders. But I started to despair.

So, I paid for some migration software. I already use UpdraftPlus and this automatically backs up my site to the cloud and they offered a migration package for about £20. Considering how much time I had spent doing all this it would have made more sense to spend that in the first place. But, you know, I wanted the experience. I do know a lot more about SQL and stuff now so it wasn’t a complete waste.

UpdraftPlus migration was easy to use and it even sent the files straight to my webserver. I thought that was quite impressive. It did take a long time though and I left it running overnight. I checked on it this morning.

The local version of WordPress was asking me to locate the backup files and then import them. As I was running a very basic and unmodified version of WordPress I hoped the import file would write all data to the SQL database and also import all the settings.

It did and quite quickly.

However, it did come up with an error reading one of the “upload” zip files. I think there must’ve been an error. Most of the website was working well and the WordPress dashboard was looking good. I think the database thought all these media files existed but Updraft couldn’t remove them from the zip file and so stopped working.

I FTP’d into the existing site and downloaded all the media files, about 5GB and FTP’d them to the NAS and hey presto. It all seems to work quite well. I am quite pleased.

I now have to go through and change the odd link here and there which won’t work because of the directory structure, but generally I am very happy with everything. I have a plugin which will crawl through and check links for me. I could also get Google to do a crawl for me, it worked really well last time to indicate some issues on the site.

This is the very first Fooyah communication on this new hosting. I am happy. If blurry eyed.

January 27 2018January 27 2018

Theme

Slowly over the last year or so I have been starting to think that this website needs a refreshed look. The current format was developed during June 2011, as can be evidenced by my use of the WordPress2010 theme here. It might be time to change and accept the size of modern monitors and displays.

This will be a major shift for me. The issue is that I still really like the layout I have. The header picture, the side bar, the menu etc. I am not sure what the new one will look like but there are some designs I know it will not copy.

I detest the newer sites out there which are designed for tablet viewing. These seem to have whole screen pictures with text over the top and then, when you scroll down, the next picture scrolls into place with more text. It’s like each “page” is actually the next vertical shot. I’m old and so would prefer my layout more newspaper like. Maybe that’s what I was working for with the current look of the site.

I will also never have auto-starting video. Who the fuck does that? I honestly thing it’s a generational thing. Being, mostly, old compared to the huge number of web consumers out there, I like things a certain way. I don’t like memory waste, I don’t like videos starting without my say-so and I don’t care for instant gratification like some hyperactive monkey. For instance, I don’t “watch” YouTube. It’s not my thing. I prefer to “watch” things on a large screen. I’ve slowly come around to the idea that YouTube is just the same as another single TV channel where the shows are all for teenagers hiding in their rooms watching things on their phones. YouTube has enough content, mostly stupid in my humble view, to keep those poor teenagers entertained. At the same time these kids aren’t learning to get bored or concentrate on a single thing for a decent amount of time. It’s messing them up.

As I have taken around six months just toying with the idea of changing this site, it could take a fair bit longer for the reality to kick in. Let’s see.

The text with a strikethrough doesn’t really belong here. It needs its own communication. Someday soon.

December 22 2017December 22 2017

Sponsorship

I think I have finally figured out how to upload decals to Gran Turismo. This means I can add whatever I want (within bounds of decency) to car liveries.

The best bit is I can save video to YouTube!

Now all I need to do is colour match my decals with this website and upload some groovy KSC based colours!

October 2 2017

Embedding!

I have noticed while looking through some of my older communications that the pictures aren’t loading. It took a little detective work to figure out that the pictures not showing were all embedded from my cloud storage.

I can’t see this from my computer as when I load the communications the picture still loads due to cloud storage cookies [I think]. When I use an incognito browser the pictures don’t load. They also don’t load on my phone and I haven’t signed in to my cloud storage in the browser application on that.

So, I have decided to upload all the pictures that were stored in the cloud to my web hosting company and then I can re-insert them into all the pages where they weren’t working properly. I suspect this will take around a month of playing a little at a time.

The existing photos need to be uploaded, which is easy. They I have to name them all, again quite easy, and then add them to each communication where they don’t show up from other browsers. I suspect that when I changed the file structure of my cloud storage the picture URLs somehow didn’t work the same way.

I’ll probably announce this update to great fanfare but it doesn’t matter a great deal. I doubt the people out there interested in the minutiae of my life really go searching for things I may have done over a year ago.

April 24 2017

It’s Probably Nothing

I have a communication I am trying to write but I can’t yet find the words. I know what I want to say and can probably sum it up in two short sentences but I really want to elucidate my offerings with my personal experiences, up to a point.

So, I wondered if I could glean some data from this website. It takes effort, time and concentration to write these communications, even if it doesn’t look like it. I thought I’d look at how many communications I had published each month since this site started and spot how that fits into my plans for another piece of writing.

I don’t like Excel, or at least the graphs it draws but this is a start. Except I’m sure it doesn’t show what I expected. Believe it or not that is a good thing in science. But it won’t help me with my writing.

Perhaps a moving average would work?

Nope. There’s not a great deal I can take from this either. My hypothesis failed entirely. Which, again is a good thing. Great bounds in understanding are made not when things go right but when they don’t go as expected. “Hmmm, that’s interesting” is probably the most exciting thing a scientist can say.

So, this didn’t work. I need another way of getting into writing the next something. It’s currently sitting as a draft with thirty words looking all sad and alone. I will get around to it. The tricky bit will be deciding which words and what order!

April 21 2014

Devil’s Work

Ha ha ha ha.

I just noticed that I have published 666 communications. Although, the problem is that this one will make it 667. That’s a shame. If I had actually bothered to look at my stats a bit more then perhaps I could have made this one self-referential.