I recently decided to move this blog from octopress, hosted on a commercial site, to hugo, hosted on gitlab pages. Why? # I don’t care that Octopress hasn’t been updated for a while but I do care that I didn’t understand what it was doing- I’m not a Ruby/Jekyll/Whatever person. I never took the time to understand how it worked under the hood, my bad. I wasn’t using 99% of the facilities offered with the commercial host.

I’ve talked previously about wanting to move Archaeogeek from Wordpress- well I’m about to start that process. I’m expecting some disruption as I feel my way with Octopress- blimey even getting 7 years of blog across intact is going to be fun! So, apologies in advance for feedburner-style reposts, broken links/comments/entire sites. In the process of making this switch, I’m going to strip out a lot of the plugins and additional bloat from the site.

… and… relax! We’ve just completed a really intense GIS project covering the entirety of the North-West of England- which we’ve been working on since Christmas. This week is the first time I have come up for air since before Christmas, and it’s been really great! I’ve been working on integrating the new free Ordnance Survey data into our nascent SDI, and updating our sites map with new features, and new data from some of our other offices.

Apologies to the couple of people who were kind enough to report portable GIS bugs on the launchpad site, only to have their bugs totally ignored. I didn’t set things up properly, and wasn’t getting email notifications. I’ll deal with the issues and post a fix if I can, and now I am getting notifications, so if anyone else finds any issues do let me know. I also don’t know how I managed to lose my contact form, but it’s back now.

The title says it all really, Archaeogeek’s second birthday snuck by the other day without me even noticing. Mr Archaeogeek says this means I have to take him out for dinner. I’m sure he has it the wrong way around, but maybe he needs rewarding for putting up with me! Anyhow, happy birthday to Archaeogeek. I’m even more astounded than I was this time last year that my attention span has lasted this long, given that it has actually been a pretty tough year around these parts.

Suddenly, in a couple of aggregated feeds that I subscribe to, I’m starting to see feeds of people’s comments, and individual posts from mailing lists. This doesn’t work for me in the slightest, as they are both snippets of conversations or threads, without real context when seen on their own. If people are interested in comments to a given post then surely they will subscribe to them anyway? Solution- unsubscribe from the aggregated feed and go through and subscribe to the individual feeds that I’m interested in.

You might have seen the new google talk chatback gadget, which allows you to embed a chat icon in your blog/website so guests can chat with you, if you’re available. The cool thing is that they don’t have to have a google account to chat with you. The code from google comes in an iframe, which wordpress doesn’t like very much for security reasons. However, if you’re game, you can get it to work with a text widget (assuming you use widgets).

I finally got around to a bit of a site re-design last night- it’s a fairly straightforward modification of the original light theme, and sorts out a few issues I’d been having with custom php and text widgets. Actually, I should confess that I’m a complete loser when it comes to the design part of web-design, so I got my web-designer hubby to help with it. Thanks Barry! Those of you that tend to visit only through your rss reader won’t, of course, be able to see any difference, so if you fancy popping around for a look at the new design, come on in, I’ll put the kettle on.