The reasons behind “I’m Back”

I checked my blog: the last entry was from 2024, and, before that, 2021. There are a two big rea­sons for that.

First off, COVID. That was depress­ing enough that I focussed on oth­er things. I was also busy with those oth­er things that I did­n’t think about writ­ing on here at the time. (It can be rough, because it is some­times dif­fi­cult to con­cen­trate for the long peri­ods of time nec­es­sary to write.)

Sec­ond­ly, there were seri­ous prob­lems with the back end of the web­site, and I did­n’t want to take the time to inves­ti­gate them. When I final­ly cat­a­loged the big book­case, stuffed full and then some, hold­ing most of The Col­lec­tion, I select­ed sev­er­al to write short pieces about over on BlueSky, but there were some that were too involved for that short for­mat, so, one night, I delved into the error logs. Main­ly, the prob­lems were with a cou­ple of the plu­g­ins, one of which was mine. That one was eas­i­ly dealt with: it was a mis­take I cor­rect­ed else­where, and neglect­ed to do here. The oth­er prob­lems were with anoth­er plu­g­in: the coder used some very out-of-date con­ven­tions in string han­dling and some ‘fan­cy’ cod­ing using tri­nary expres­sions that should have been han­dled with straight-for­ward if/then/else struc­tures. I also took the time to clean up some of the cor­rupt­ed char­ac­ters: some­where along the way, some of the left and right dou­ble quote marks got changed to weird char­ac­ters, so I went through some of the posts to clean them up. Some­times, just the thought of fix­ing every­thing was enough to turn me away: not sure what hap­pened, but I am glad it did happen.

I still need to go through the bro­ken links and clean them up and look at using a bet­ter theme, so if things look a lit­tle wonky at times, its just the out­ward signs of the back end construction.