Lee Perry
April 7th, 2024

Rebuilding my digital life in Kirby CMS

In last weeks Scribble I talked a little about why I was looking to move from micro.blog to a self-hosted solution.  This week I'll talk about how that has gone, and what there remains left to do.


First though, a couple of real world updates.

TalkPython Training

I've always liked Mike's courses, and commercial approach.  He sells his courses on an own forever model with a yearly subscription approach to obtaining new courses in the library.  Year 1 costs 100%, with year 2 discounted 33% and year 3 50%.  What's even better is that you can buy the subsequent year pack at any point - it's not necessary to buy an update each year.

Anyway, I saw an email appear in my inbox about price rises.  I'd been meaning to buy a year 2 pack anyway as there was a Django course in the library that I wanted access to.  So 5 years later, I've finally got around to buying year 2.  Excellent approach - check them out.

Expect to see me talking lots about all things Pythonic over the next wee while.

Promotion to the Championship

After a very trying season, Burnley look almost certain to be promoted from the Premier League to the Championship next season.  No VAR, and hopefully better referees, and better pies in stadiums.

I talked about our draw at home to Wolves on Tuesday evening, and defeat away at Everton yesterday over on my website.  I also talked a bit about Everton, and why I think that they look to be following the financial trajectory of Bolton, Bradford and Leeds before them.

Work

Was a busy week at the mill, as those that keep human children in their houses were largely on holidays, things should return to normal next week.

I had volunteered to support my professional body on a committee.  When I didn't hear back for 6 weeks I figured that I knew the response - and that finally landed today.  I'll just focus on the day job rather than trying to progress through that club.

Kirby CMS

Much of my week has been spent loading content into the Kirby CMS based site that I am working on locally and synchronising through to my staging site at staging.lee-perry.co.uk. 

At this point I have loaded in 500 of around 650 longform articles on my site.  The other 150 are articles about virtual cycling routes from my old insideRide project, which I have decided to drop and start again - given the minimal traffic those posts get.

I have built specific content types around this in my Kirby build - for routes and for activities, which will connect with one another.  I hope in time to be able to visualise that data on the site, given that I have created fields for distance, ascent, power, heart rate, energy burned, pace and time.  Given that much of that structured data was missing from the original articles, it didn't really make sense to waste time reformatting and researching - a new start helps to relaunch the site faster.

I still have lots to do, though I'm hoping to take it live in the next week or so:

Barriers to launch

  • OpenGraph meta tags need plumbing properly for the different content types and structures.  They are working, but preview cards are sub-optimal and need reviewing now there is meaningful content to test them with.
  • I need to get my site feed up and running.  My sitemap is working really well, but I have struggled to get the site feed working in my early attempts.  I see this feature as one that must be there for launch.
  • I have also installed a redirects plugin.  I'm not going to worry about redirecting all traffic, but will focus on making sure that links to my most popular articles (usually those about installing Championship Manager 2001/02 on MacOS *really*) find their way through to the new url.

Nice to have for launch

  • I have around 1,000 short form articles on my site, which also need to be imported.  Not all of those will make their way across, though my vast collection of photographs of our canine family, all tagged up, almost certainly will.  I have all of the photographs ready to go, and I have all of the words in MarsEdit, so I'm happy to upload these over time (so long as I do, my last 2 migrations of this site were still not fully complete!).
  • When I loaded my mountaineering photos from 2004 - 2007, I did not realise that the images were not being resized and compressed by the image plugin because of the size settings.  I changed that once I realised, but I have about 100 articles to iterate back through.
  • I'd like to get at least aspects of my theme into this build before it goes live.  I've worked out how to install the Atkinson Hyperlegible font without calling a google fonts script - but I'd like to at least style up the banner before going live.

Post launch work

  • I'm really excited about setting up the Fediverse plugins on the site so that it can interact directly with Mastodon and elsewhere.  Happy to get this running on the site once it is live though.
  • I also need to build templates for routes and activities.  The content from the blueprints already publish, but I need to build the specific fields that I have created into the templates.

Lots of work done on the site this week, but lots still to do.  Would love to hear your feedback.

Until the next time.