Well, this is my first post after quite a few years. Well, there has been a pandemic in between and like most of us it has had a significant impact. There has not been much time for anything other than day-to-day activity.

However, I have had a desire to get back to posting for quite a while. In the past I have found the blog useful when writing papers, because I have an historical record of the work that I have; that’s perhaps more important these days as the gaps between my research can be quite variable. I also fancied revisting my earlier tendency to write some crazy ideas up.

One of the main blockers has been technological. The very first version of this blog used an Emacs mode, muse, to generate static files. After that, I moved over to Wordpress and even added to it extensively, so that I would get citations and the like working. I had a fun time doing it.

But over time, hosting the Wordpress has got more of a hassle. The whole lot needs regular updating and although the command line tools Wordpress wrote were a big help, in the end I probably spent longer updating it than writing material. The main issue, though, is that it needs a pile of PHP, a database backend and has a web delivered admin interface. In these days of industrial hacking and increased security, it is getting harder and harder to achieve this. So, in the end, I decided to ditch the whole lot and go back to the future; a set of static files. No longer with muse-mode, but now using markdown and Zola. For old time sake, I have made my own theme reworked from the muse-mode theme I originally used, which in itself was a CSS driven port of ht2html which I used years back for my website. Very retro and very garish. It’s also not finished and some of the links are broken. Perfection is, I think, the enemy of the good here.

Fingers crossed, I will find the time and it will advance.