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We have a lot of side responsibilities at the small NFP I work for. You know when you’re the only person that is good at doing something so you do it even if it’s not technically your job? That kind of thing.

I do a lot of the maintenance and “fiddling” with our WordPress website. I quite like it. Recently I have hit upon an extremely therapeutic activity: managed 404s.

We have a plugin to manage redirections for missing pages. I don’t exactly want to get to zero 404s but I do want to catch and redirect those I can to meaningful places. Even if it is a 410 response.

The really fun part is the plugin supports regular expressions. When I first started working with the plugin my efforts were limited to basic wildcard matches. Now I have even started with optional groups and substitutions. I’m by no means an expert but it is a great learning enviroment.

Today I have come up with a solution I am quite proud of. For some reason, our developer set the versions on our CSS and JS files to randomise occasionally. I assume this is for some sort of caching purposes. Anyway, this can generate some harmless 404s that I don’t want to be logged.

Using the regular expression 101 website I created this solution. Not much point explaining it here as the site does that very well. Any 404 that matches this pattern is excluded from the 404 logs, which helps me spot meaningful 404s much quicker.

Very pleased

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Classy PHP stock image

Today I wrote my first PHP code for deployment. I’m super proud!  I need to caveat that, though.

When I say “wrote” I mean I found some code online that did half of what I wanted to do. Then I found some code that did the other half of what I wanted to do. Then I put them together. Then I looked at existing code to see how my code needed to work. Once that was working, I adapted it to include a feature that no-one else seemed to have thought of. And, of course, I tested it all in production.

What is it? Just a few lines to add images to an RSS feed generated by WordPress. Already implemented by many a plugin but I like do some things my own way.

You can prove how poor Twitter recommendation algorithms are by following a Linux distribution. It will suggest you follow others… as if, right?

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Today I wasted about two hours trying to layout a responsive page using the classes from the wrong version of Bootstrap ?

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I discovered Linux in about 2001. Weirdly, I was in Tanzania at the time and didn’t have a PC of my own to install it on. That had to wait until 2003, when, as a postgrad on a tight budget, I bought a cheap, ex-corporate Dell Latitude laptop. It had one USB 1.0 port and no built-in ethernet. Yes, it was a longtime ago.

A truly amazing range of laptops, they had a modular drive system, which meant I was able to get a zip drive relatively easily. And that was important because at the time you needed a SCSI card on a desktop to connect to most Zip drives. And I needed Zip for my GIS course. Big files.

Laptops, at that time, also relied heavily on PCMCIA cards for commuincations, be that 56k fax/modems, ethernet or, gasp, wireless.

I imagine most people have their “hardware geek” phase a little earlier than I did. Over the course of 2003/4 I had a fantastic time shopping on eBay for bargain laptop drive modules and various comms cards. They all had to be Linux compatible so lots of careful research was required.

Fast forward to today. Well, I still have loads of this stuff, including the PCMCIA cards shown. I haven’t had a laptop that would support them for about two years. Why have a kept them?

Mainly, I convinced myself that they had some value to someone. Until recently, I had no idea why. Then I started thinking about why I was finding it so hard to get rid of them.

I realised that I felt that, somewhere, there was someone that would get as much pleasure from fiddling with this tech as I did in 2003. At the very least I thought by keeping them I might at some time recapture that “golden” time in my life.

In reality, these things are technologically worthless and ten a penny on eBay and my personal circumstances have changed beyond recognition. I barely have time to write this blog, let alone tinker with ancient technology for hours on end. Also, even if I had the time and the hardware to fettle with, I don’t know if I’d even enjoy it! I have moved on in so many ways.

So, now I know why they were important to me, I do need to let them go. They’re a physical reminder of time that can’t be recaptured and shouldn’t be. It’s better to remember that time fondly, than imagine it might some day come back.

And, besides, if such hazy days did return, in say, 25 years, they’ll be way better things to tinker with!

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My wife and I have been working hard to de-clutter our house. In lay-person’s terms, that means “getting rid of stuff we don’t need.” A very large part of this process has been inspired by The Minimalists and their podcast. It was my wife that first stumbled across these guys and I genuinely think they have changed both of our attitudes to “stuff”.

When we moved to our current home we bought a whole load of stuff that, when we came to unpacking, we just didn’t know what to do with. It all just sat in the largest spare bedroom. There was a lot of it. This is surprising considering we came from a 1.5 bed flat in London. To this day I have no idea where we kept it all.

The majority of my stuff falls into two clear categories. One is stuff I kept “just in case.” The second is sentimental knickknacks. So, things that I might one day need or things that I might one day want to look back at. Will that one day ever come?

On the first category, The Minimalists have a simple rule. If it can be replaced for less than $20 in less than 20 minutes, get rid of it. This might seem like a horrible path to disposable consumerism but really it’s the opposite. Once you have this maxim fixed in mind, it stops you buying things “just in case” too.

By far the biggest volume of “just in case” stuff I have is PC hardware and equipment. Some of the stuff is at least 15 years old and so completely obsolete but I’m having hard time letting go of it. This has been really frustrating. I look at it, I know it’s basically junk, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

So, rather than set myself the goal of getting rid of it I’ve instead decided to focus on WHY I don’t want to get rid. I’ll use this blog to look at just a few of the items I find it hard to let go of and try to capture why it’s important to me. With that done, I hope I’ll then take the next step.

It’s great. Except we basically won’t be able to recruit any spies from pretty much here on out. Whoops. https://t.co/UyIypRuApx