I wrote about my history of Linux Distros here. At the time I indicated I was using Ubuntu 16.04 with the Gnome 3 desktop. That was true (and technically is at the moment), but it won’t be for long.
I find frequent issues with my current setup. Nautilus (the file manager) simply refuses to start when I first fire up the machine three times out of four. It will eventually start – perhaps one or two minutes after I need it. I receive regular crash report notifications telling me something hasn’t worked and inviting me to send some information to someone so they can think about fixing it never. I receive crash reports for programs I’m not even running, or need to run. And sometimes (once every five or six boots) my wifi network isn’t found. It hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just that Mr (or Mrs) Ubuntu can’t find it.
[Below is the text of a sermon I preached at our church on Easter morning, 1st April 2018.]
Matthew 27:46
Aramaic – Heart Language
My offering today is half sermon, half reflection. As I pondered and prayed about what to speak about a couple of weeks ago a phrase came to mind. I gave God the opportunity to change His mind but I kept coming back to this particular phrase.
At work we have a website that uses Joomla. The site administrator has left the organisation so the site’s administration is falling to me. I haven’t had much to do with Joomla (or the work website) in the past. I had looked Joomla briefly (along with WordPress, Drupal, Hugo, Grav and Jekyll) last year when considering what sort of engine could best drive the great beast egeiro.net.
As a result, I’ve had to spend time installing/running/checking/modifying/learning Joomla over recent weeks. I’ve loaded it up on several computers locally and accessed it using XAMPP and/or WAMP. These applications run Apache, MySQL and PHP so that web applications can be installed and tested offline.
Last year I posted some brief ponderings about a few different wikis. At the time I was intent on getting to grips with TiddlyWiki. I began doing that and used it within my employment for around 5 or 6 weeks. During that time I migrated my previous notes into TiddlyWiki and began using it to take notes during meetings and to record a range of tasks and activities. Shortly after that, however, I came across what was, for me, was a major hurdle. That hurdle was accessing and updated my wiki whilst I was travelling. Each time I edited and saved the wiki it was another 1+mb of usage on my mobile plan. Even a one-letter change and save would mean the wiki in toto was being resaved to my cloud storage. As a result TiddlyWiki got shelved.
I really like the simplicity yet elegance of Anders Noren’s WordPress themes. Currently I’m using Hemingway. The only change I make is to show excerpts rather than full posts on the front and summary pages. This is easily done by editing the theme file directly. The change needed is to access Appearance – Editor in the admin panel, select file content.php and change line 65 (which may change) from
When I first began this blog in May 2017 I wanted to avoid heavy CMS’ like WordPress, Joomla etc. I instead wanted a flat file system and chose Hugo.
I still like the idea or the philosophy behind a flat file approach, but my setup meant I could only update posts from one machine. I think this was somewhat limiting so I reconsidered my platform. After fiddling with Joomla, I have instead gone for WordPress. I have had some limited experience with WordPress in the past with a church website so it was a shallow learning curve.