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Facing WordPress Demons
A blog-building experience from someone eternally confused by web design.
Creating this site was not easy, and neither is maintaining it. Of course, it was never the behind-the-scenes stuff that I was keen on, but the random pontifications on the meaning of life, the universe and everything.
Regardless of my initial plans, setting up and sustaining the infrastructure has taken up a considerable amount of time and energy. Let me take you through that process, interspersing it with some tips for those contemplating a similar route. Some may read this and laugh, thinking that these are very easy challenges to understand and answer. I would caution – not for many of us unacquainted with the syntax of the web, facing a global database that is progressively more nebulous. With only ourselves as interpreters to rely on.
Note: Though I share some plugins I found helpful below, do not construe this as endorsement. What works for one person may not work for another. Each site construction will be its own puzzle.
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Saturday, the first day of a week off from work, and the first day of the winter holiday break. I have already reverted to my natural, nocturnal state, still awake at 4am and wondering what to do next. The rest period has barely begun and I am convinced I need to pick up an activity to occupy myself lest boredom arrives.
After all, I do not celebrate any holidays. It is freezing outside and I will not be venturing too far. The fridge is stocked and the apartment is comfortable – I have everything I need right here. Local acquaintances have travelled to be with family; they will not come calling. This is a welcome sabbatical from regular existence.
So I decide, on a whim, to cross an item off the long-growing to-do list.
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Me Gustas Tú
I am currently cramming as much Spanish as I can in rushed preparation for a trip to the hinterlands of Chile. The lessons undertaken today gave an overview of the various conjugative couplings of ‘me gusta’ and ‘me encanta’.
All I could think about was this classic by Manu Chao (who’s wiki page, by the way, makes for some interesting reading). And I have a feeling it will be circling around in my head throughout the coming week. Es demasiado bueno.
A nostalgia trip for those of us who were playing FIFA video games in the early to late 2000s. This one was featured on numerous discs. How could it not be.
The countdown continues…
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Weekly Picks – August 4, 2024
Credit (left to right): Katalin Balog/ 3 Quarks Daily; Kamal Kishore/ Reuters; pics721/ Shutterstock; Petra PéterffyThis week’s collection:
- American Descent
- ‘Nobody knows what I know’: how a loyal RSS member abandoned Hindu nationalism
- Artificial Wombs When?
- Israeli Journalist Gideon Levy on the Killing of Gaza
- Excavating a Language at the End of the World
- What Is Left of the Mind
- Debt Is a Labor Issue
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Weekly Picks – July 28, 2024
Credit (left to right): Noma Bar; Abdullah Farouk/ Unsplash; David Bacon; Gent Shkullaku/ AFP/ Getty Images; Harol BustosThis week’s collection:
- Secrets of a ransomware negotiator
- Who’s Afraid of the Student Intifada?
- Adventures Close to Home
- Should We Abolish Prisons?
- Who Owns Garbage? – Understanding Illegal Recycling Workers
- US Corporations Pump Aquifers Dry as Police Kill Water Defenders in Rural Mexico
- The dangerous effects of rising sea temperatures
- Not only kafala
- The Physics of Cold Water May Have Jump-Started Complex Life
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Awaiting a More Glorious Dawn
Thunderstorms roll by in sporadic waves, curses of the cooling summer weather. The wildfire map of Western Canada is dotted with red and orange as towns evacuate people and welcome flames. The roads that afford access to sanctuaries slowly dwindle. A haze settles down for who-knows-how-long, as the smoke intensifies. There is as much anxiety as there is ash in the air.
All of this, preventable. People continue practices antithetical to our very existence. Consume more. Drive those big trucks. Force workers back to the office. Eat factory farmed meat. Make the carcinogenic choice. But not everything is a personal battle; industry maintains the supremacy of profit while politicians line up to apply band-aids to widening wounds. Who champions fundamental responsibility? Who dares to proffer more?
I too, find myself escaping rather than engaging. Enough to worry about at work or in waking life; enough to tire me out, discouraging sustained action. Better to dwell on romanticized notions.
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Weekly Picks – July 21, 2024
Credit (left to right): Adrià Fruitós; Remy Steinegger/ Wikimedia; Harland Miller, Courtesy of White Cube Gallery; Staffan Widstrand/ Rewilding EuropeThis week’s collection:
- Literature Without Literature
- How Europe’s only Indigenous group is inspiring a greener Christianity
- How Microfinance Became the ‘It’ Development Program
- To a Starving Orphan Who Died Alone in Rubble
- Philanthropy’s Power Brokers
Further reading on Bill Gates, the Gates Foundation, and broader issues with billionaire-led philanthropic endeavors (the first three pieces are by Tim Schwab, who is quoted in the article above):
- Bill Gates’s Charity Paradox
- While the Poor Get Sick, Bill Gates Just Gets Richer
- Bill Gates, Climate Warrior. And Super Emitter.
- How Bill Gates Impeded Global Access to Covid Vaccines
- Bill Gates’s Philanthropic Giving Is a Racket
- Dark cloud over good works of Gates Foundation
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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Skye: A Gallery
You wake up on a train, somewhere in Northern Scotland, headed westward to the Hebrides.
You gaze out the glass window, just one of many lenses that are filtering the view. The fog, rain, snow, and swathes of sunlight intermingle, showering mystery, color, calm, and turbulence onto the environment in equal measure.
Familiar structures and dwellings fade and vanish as the world grows colder with time. The vistas become less vibrant. They slowly evolve into eternal photographs, unmoving environments etched into the earth. As still and resilient as the riverside ice, refusing to yield, content in placidity.
The hues become duller and more nebulous as the train winds its way through mountainous terrain, a steel snake deftly navigating valleys, avoiding burial by the elements. Bright blues and greens of milder climates are replaced with dirtied whites, greys, and browns of forgotten lands.
But this is where you begin to perceive it – a tricksy phenomenon afoot. Hints of something hidden behind these bare tundras.
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Weekly Picks – July 14, 2024
Credit, left: Jack Jen Gieseking. Credit, center (clockwise from top-left): Eyðfinnur Olsen/ Alamy Stock Photo; Pratyush Dhawan; Nesma Moharam; AP Photo/ Ng Han Guan; Creative Touch Imaging Ltd. / NurPhoto via Getty Images; Etienne Laurent / AFP / Getty. Credit, right: Selman Design.This week’s collection:
- Dreaming of a Great World
- Five Ring Circus
- Queer Maps, Data, Devices, and Resistance
- Blood in the Water, Food on the Table, Protesters on the Shore
- 26 million tons of clothing end up in China’s landfills each year, propelled by fast fashion
- How gamification took over the world
- Inside Ziklag, the Secret Organization of Wealthy Christians Trying to Sway the Election and Change the Country
- I Went to Death Valley to Experience 129 Degrees
- A Deal With the Devil: What the Age-Old Faustian Bargain Reveals About the Modern World
- Canada Is Arming the World’s Bullies
Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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World, Hold On
It began with a harmless conversation about the credulity we all carry. Our willingness to see past all kinds of falsities, fallacies, inconsistencies, and hokum. Our yearning to believe in something. An evolutionary entrapment that has led us equally to our darkest depths and highest heights.
A meal and some thoughts shared, and some inspiration found. An umbrella under which too many topics reside. Pseudosciences and pseudohistories of all kinds, bereft of credibility and yet magnetic to their adherents.
I chose cults as a worthy topic of exploration. Fictional ones, anyway. Perhaps an examination of some genre films to tease out greater truths surrounding collective tendencies powered by individual vulnerabilities.
The idea was written and the draft started. Then I noticed all the others in my directory. Satellites launched into orbit, as promising as they were unfinished. Gliding along – momentum assured. Undiminished but static.
Fulfilling ambition a constant struggle when the majority of your energy is demanded elsewhere.
Something to look forward to.
Imagination reaching escape velocity. Outpacing the pen, as expected.
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Streaks Blue and Red
Today was the warmest day in Prince George this year. So far.
The temperature outside hit 35 C. Even though the inside of my apartment was slightly cooler, it only took a few minutes on the exercise bike before the sweat began pouring. For some reason this brought back a memory of walking through the Academy Museum in Los Angeles earlier this year. Specifically, an exhibit on Spike Lee’s 1989 treatise on race relations, Do the Right Thing.
The exhibit had several engaging behind-the-scenes videos playing in which the filmmakers spoke about their craft and process. The one that stuck out to me was an interview with Ernest Dickerson, the film’s cinematographer. He shared the different methods that his team used to imbue the film’s scenes with heat. Bright, warm color schemes in the architecture; butane-lit fuses just below the camera as it rolled to create a hazy layer that sat between the lens and subject, mirroring humidity; actors sprayed with water before each scene; all in service of a narrative filled with beguiling tension.
It was generally warm while they shot the film, but they wanted to up the pathetic fallacy. The buildings needed to bleed; the people’s inner emotions needed a worthy reflection in unforgiving asphalt.