Almost a year ago, I wrote about a tweak to this very website that split off the films into their own sub-site, to try and speed things up as a publisher. It turns out, the more you write, the more a static site generator struggles to keep up. Well, fast forward to the present and I’m very happy to say the films are back home where they belong - all within mrschristine.com. It’s only a slight change but it makes a big difference - the films appear on the homepage now, in all the same feeds, and in the More to Explore section on the sidebar.

This website, mrschristine.com, has been hosted on a static site generator for just over three years and it’s been a fantastic step forward for me. At the time of the big switchover, I wrote about the pros and cons of moving away from Wordpress and it’s fair to say since then the pros keep getting better and better but the cons haven’t necessarily gone away.

At the start of this year, I made good progress with learning Swift but of course two things got in the way - real life, and then SwiftUI. When SwiftUI was announced in June, it sounded too good to be true (anything to not have to use interface builder anymore) but I figured I’d be better off waiting to see what it had to offer before continuing my journey.

Dark Mode has been available on macOS for a while now but Apple are bringing it to mobile devices when iOS 13 is released in September. In preparation for this, I’ve added support for Dark Mode on this blog, and it’s soooooo pretty! This is a huge step for the site, not just because Dark Mode is a nice feature, easier on the eyes, and a great option to have for reading content on the web. But also, because I’m no longer beholden to Wordpress to make it available, or to the theme makers to enable it.

I’ve been watching Apple WWDC keynotes for a few years now, and they’re often quite interesting with bits and pieces that make a difference to me and how I use my devices. This year seemed different – perhaps because I made strides towards learning Swift and being a developer myself, but perhaps also because they announced such a lot of things. I was hooked, and afterwards my brain was buzzing.

I’ve been up and running with this new website structure for about two weeks now and I’m still loving it. I don’t know if it’s just the novelty of it all or if the effort gone into simplifying everything has paid off, but I want to blog more and when I do, I write more too. The film and album review process is more immediate which means I have more thoughts and more to say. That can only be a good thing.

It’s been a long time since I made any significant changes to my blog and the system it runs on, and now, seemingly overnight, everything has completely changed. This isn’t the work of a moment though. This is something I’ve been thinking about for at least three years. The problem I’ve used Wordpress for many, many moons now and whilst I’ve always thought it was functional in a way that would work for most people, it never quite fit my purposes. I have a variety of different content that all needs something slightly different - from a grid layout for music and books, to the note-taking style of a Film Watch review, as well as the more standard blogging template.

Learning Swift programming isn’t easy, but I must admit the language has stuck with me far more than any other attempts I’ve made to learn programming languages in the past. I credit much of that to the 100 Days Of Swift schedule that I mentioned last time – a brilliantly structured path that gives you code snippets to learn, example apps, and challenges to keep practicing. With that in mind, here are five things I’ve uncovered so far in my journey.

My Swift journey so far has been stop/start in nature, but recently it has become one of those hobbies that occupies a significant portion of my mind, one that I think about a solid 90% of the day. That’s good, really, because it’s a useful skill, coding, and one I am still very much at the early stages of grappling with. I’m never quite sure how much detail to go into here, really, because is it interesting to read about someone else learning how to code? I don’t know. What I am confident in, though, is sharing the resources that are helping me along the way.

I had to put my ’learn Swift’ project on the backburner for the last few weeks but I’m catching up again now we have a few festive days of freedom. That’s what most people do, right? Spend Christmas afternoon digesting mince pies and learning how to code? Last time I wrote about finishing up the first course on Ray Wenderlich’s iOS path and moving on to the second which was more about Swift. I’ll admit, I found that one a touch harder than I was expecting - some of the concepts seemed a bit unnecessary for this stage in the course (still being a total beginner), and they also used not-so-simple maths concepts as a way to demonstrate some of the coding tricks. It was hard to relate, so I had to keep stopping and pausing and thinking about what it would mean if I was making my own app.

Earlier this year, I worked my way through Swift Playgrounds – Apple’s easy-to-use educational tool to teach you the basics of the Swift language – and to celebrate, purchased a quite adorable R2D2 that you can program with that self-same language. Unfortunately, I couldn’t quite make the leap in my head from the playgrounds I had been messing about with to the more tangible efforts with a toy, and the instructions that came with that little droid were a bit more advanced than I was.

In my adventures with Swift programming, I mentioned the R2-D2 toy/gadget that you can bring home and programme yourself. When I wrote about it, it was a delicious want rather than a need, but somehow over the course of a sunny few days off, I ended up with the very same Artoo bluetoothing himself to my iPad. I’ve only been playing for a little while but first impressions are: This is the cutest thing ever! It bleeps and bloops, the tripod wheel comes in and out and it whizzes around making that scream noise that R2-D2 is so famous for. You can control it via a Sphero app, which makes it more of a remote control style toy, or you can actually sit down and programme it.

So, I mentioned Swift Playgrounds recently and thought I would share more of my experience with the app. I tweeted a summary that basically covered my history with trying to learn Swift.

I’m currently working my way through the various options for learning how to code via Swift Playgrounds, and branched out recently to the standalone session that lets you adapt a version of the well known game Rock Paper Scissors. The demo first lets you play the game so you can see how it works, then it asks you to personalise the game with a variety of options. I think it wants you to pick the colours that each player uses and perhaps adjust the hue of the background, but I went for a slightly more ambitious personalisation scheme.

Once upon a time, before blogging was popular and Twitter even existed, I used to learn PHP. I had my books, I had my LAMP setup, and I had an expert at code sitting not too far away. There are various mentions of it on this site, until at one point, I gave it up in disgust. I had ambitions beyond my ability, and more importantly, beyond my patience. When it comes to learning code, I understand and enjoy the logic but get bogged down in the detail. My syntax often fails, even if I have all the right bits in the right order.

Following the revelations of Whittled Down, I now have information about things I’m adding to Smarter Than Your Average. If you visit the site, rather than a feed reader, you might notice that I’ve reverted to the old Vigilance theme. I used to use this one in the good ol’ days of self-hosting, and I got a familiar sense of wellbeing when I selected it from the Wordpress options. (Incidentally, this post on the Wordpress blog gives me great hope for the future choice of themes on hosted WP.)

Hi there, I am testing out the new Wordpress App for Android with a random post. To make it slightly worthwhile, here are some snippets of thought: Why is it people never ask what you did the previous evening or weekend when you actually have something worthwhile to say? What is the etiquette on retweeting someone who has their Twitter account protected? I really need to do a Media. Future. Change episode soon. I’ll be back in a moment to test out the edit function and report my findings.

A few times recently, we’ve been asked the question: I’m starting a new blog, which platform should I use? Of the free software that is available, the two main ones are Blogger and Wordpress and I will always opt for Wordpress. Here are my five reasons: Wordpress just feels more professional. Even if you’re starting a blog for purely fun reasons, I feel like the layout of WP admin is a lot cleaner and more intuitive to use. There is a progression path. With Blogger, you can set up a free account and type away. You can purchase a custom domain if you want, but that seems to be the limit. On WP, you start with the free account, and if you get on with it, there is the option to take the host-it-yourself path which gives you unlimited choices in terms of themes, widgets and customisation. Themes. There are a million themes out there if you choose the DIY route, but even on the wordpress.com domain the selected few themes you can choose from are pretty nice. It’s easy to make them unique and individual by changing header pictures and tweaking the widgets. Blogger seems more limited in this sense. Comments. Trying to leave a comment on a Blogger site is sometimes more hassle than it’s worth. There are the crazy spam-blocker pictures, plus confusing options when it comes to identifying yourself. Wordpress has the four standard text entry fields, so you always know where you are. Wordpress is better. It just is. Okay, so I ran out of reasons, but I will always recommend WP over Blogger. It’s a personal decision, though, and above all else, getting blogging is more important than your software of choice.

At some point, if you’re looking at Smarter Than Your Average, it should change from a Wordpress.com template, to a rather more customisable design. While the web is gradually making it’s way towards 3.0, STYA has taken that great leap into the world of web hosting and FTP for it’s very own version 2. I’m not going to make any rash promises about hundreds of posts and lots of fascinating features, but you should probably be able to tell that the blog is already getting a bit more love and attention than it used to. And we haven’t even got to New Year’s Resolutions yet.

Sidepodcast has a brand new Wordpress theme, introduced for the New Year, and I wrote it. I can’t claim 100% of the credit, but a lot of the fundamental CSS work was mine. There were just a few twiddly, fiddly bits that I needed a hand with. I couldn’t find a theme that suited me so I decided to write my own. You have to start by picking a layout that you like, regardless of colours or images. I didn’t do this, and started with the default Kubrick theme - which made my life that tiny bit harder.

I don’t know if you noticed the adverts that appeared on the left hand side. I always said I would rather stick a fork in my eye that put adverts on my site, and let me tell you, if I could find a fork, I might be heading towards a hospital right about now. My only defense is that I was talked into it. With five sites to my name, most of them still under construction, domain and hosting prices are creeping ever higher. I didn’t want to do it, but it’d be nice to recoup some of those costs.

The comment spam has caught up with me. It was only a matter of time. Actually, there was a spate of it a month or so ago, (it started the day after I commented on someone else’s website to say I’d never had any - now that’s irony!), but we put in a temporary fix by closing the older comment forms. However, I came across some spam on my latest entry. It may have been a one-off, but it’s unlikely.

I’ve decided that Woke Up This Morning needs a lick of paint. I haven’t changed my site for about a year and a half. That’s a ridiculous amount of time - especially considering I used to chop and change every week before that. I suppose it’s a lack of time at the moment, and with so many other projects on the go at once, WUTM has just been taking a back seat and keeping its head down. But with 101 Words looking so snazzy (well, as good as it can look on a hosted template that I have little control over), I thought it was about time that WUTM had the same treatment.

I didn’t win the lottery. It buoys me somewhat that no one did, however this means I will have to buy another ticket this week and go through the whole process again. For the last three months or so, I’ve been volunteering to design and update a website for a friend. I’ve spent days on this website, making the different sections, writing the content from the information I’m given, and sorting out all the pictures. I also spent a very long time getting a database up and running for visitor polls.

Mr C and I had a bit of a barney last night. He’s been sorting out the categories on my website, making it possible to stick entries in more than one. So, actually, I think these are tags. But he was adamant that they’re the same thing. Category = Tag. Tag = Category. Well, actually, Dictionary.Com says: Category = A specifically defined division in a system of classification; a class. Tag = To label, identify, or recognise with or as if with a tag.

I started trying to do some stuff on my site last night (mostly involving forms and validation and stuff like that), and I got stressed out and gave up. This website is the hardest thing I’ve ever worked on, and I’m really, really proud of the fact that I haven’t given up with it. It’s probably the longest project I’ve ever embarked on and I’m still interested in it and want it to be better. That’s impressive for me, the girl with the attention span of a gnat.

You’ve spent so much time working on your website that during the day at work, you realise that you’ve been writing a letter at work and have escaped all the &’s.

Mmm, haven’t had a Crunchie for ages. I’m trying really hard to learn this database stuff and I am getting somewhere, but I always end up feeling so stupid because I understand how all the stuff works. I can see how the code makes what happens happen, but I can’t begin to construct my own code, my brain just isn’t logical enough for that, I guess. It’s really frustrating, because the computer expert just comes along and makes it look like child’s play, while I don’t even know where to start. I’ve learnt this stuff twice and am still no nearer to knowing what the hell to do.

Lots to say so I’ll just get on with it. I’ve been buying games by the truckload, even though I wasn’t really done with the ones I had before. Have now got The Simpsons Hit & Run (very funny), Pirates of The Caribbean game (a little hard to control but I’ve not given up yet!) and Zoo Tycoon Marine Mania, which is really fun and adds dolphins and jellyfish and sharks to my zoos. It’s hard to get anything done these days.

Anyway… website update - 101 Words will have its own site very soon. I apologise for the delay but learning PHP and MySql is bound to take more than a day and it happens that I keep getting distracted by iTunes and Prince of Persia! And on the subject of iTunes, please note the new iMix section, I just discovered playlists and will probably be up till the early hours creating them! And to do that, I’m probably going to have to download some new music. Shame.

It’s been a mad few days and if I wrote any of it down here, you’d never believe it, so I won’t bother. What I actually want to talk about is the computer stuff I’ve managed to get done today. On Thursday when I was setting up all websites and such, I got a little annoyed when everything I was trying so hard to fix wasn’t working and I ended up asking Mr C for help. I really wanted to do it by myself. I tried SO hard!

I’ve got a couple of days off and I’m being quite productive with them for a change. Instead of just sitting around and doing nothing, I’m sitting around and getting things done! It’s great. I just set up Thunderbird with all my mailboxes and things. I’ve been sorting out my websites and getting them sorted out on this new system, and also setting up Apache to be able to do PHP. Don’t I sound like I know what I’m talking about?

So, today’s the day. I’m sorting out my website again, once and for all. I’ve decided that it needs updating and I have a whole weekend on my own with no distractions to get it done. Except that really good book that I started yesterday. And the television. And the trip to town and the supermarket I have to fit in. But yes, best get started!

Today I watched James Bond - one that I haven’t seen for ages. It’s such an institution, it always cheers me up. Yesterday, I wrote a lot of notes for the software testing that I learnt and I also started a new book on UML. My hands are hurting from too much writing! I’ve been a little obsessed with bid-up.tv the last couple of days, it really draws me in. My favourite auctioneer is Peter Simon - he used to be on kids tv!

I’m trying to do lots of things with this page, but I’m getting confused with all the folders and stuff. Mostly, it’s just experimenting which is fine, but I have lots of things that I want to use and no real outlet to use them. I also need to think of a new name, given the lack of stories that have appeared on this website, I can’t really warrant having the name storyteller.

I learnt so much PHP today, and I finished off reading the software testing book that I started, so my brain is full of wonderful facts and figures. Today, I got a hangman game to work (only broken because of a damned ampersand!). It’s not aesthetically very good, there are no spaces between the letters so it’s hard to play, but the point is - it works!

I did so much learning yesterday, my brain’s in a bit of a spin. PHP and Software Testing and I was doing stuff on my website which is always teaching me new things. Thankfully, it wore me out so I slept okay. I woke up a bit too early for my liking, but that’s just the way it is.