Why we can’t have nice things

My wireless SD card, an Eye-Fi Pro X2, bought in 2013, was a nice little card that went in my camera. When I took photos the card synced them to my phone, geotagging them in the process. The photos would then sync to Flickr when the phone was next connected to Wi-Fi. If I wanted to use mobile data I could share them from my phone almost immediately. Most of the photos on this site used that process. There was also a desktop app which didn’t reinstall when I upgraded my desktop PC to Windows 10 last year as I rarely needed to use it – the phone app was still working fine and I was very happy with it.
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Recent Links November 21, 2016

A post of recent links. Even by my standard this one has taken ages to post.

Situation Normal

After two changes of operating systems involving two reinstalls and a change in hosting provider, I’ve decided the point has come where I need to give less attention to around with the server and start posting again. Along the way I went down the rabbit hole and explored Google PageSpeed Insights, where improving the score is possibly the darkest art I’ve come across across since I started setting up websites. Change one thing to try to improve the score and instead it makes it worse – reverse the change and the worse score remains. Flush all the caches. It still stays at the lower score.

And don’t get me started on “Render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content”, which seems to be baked into the core of WordPress – only way of stopping so far has involved accepting a Flash of (or even permanent) Unstyled Content, which in 2016 I’m not prepared to do. So I’ve taken things as far as I can for the moment and the only negative at the moment is that my Gravatar doesn’t appear properly on posts. Any more substantial PageSpeed improvements would involve a fundamental redesign of the site and to do that I think it would be better to stop changing the existing site and instead set up a test one and gradually build it back up from scratch. I know that’s really just good practice but this experience has reminded me that what starts out as a bit of apparently harmless tweaking can open up a world of pain on a live site.

The day job also hasn’t helped but without that I doubt I would be posting in the first place. Now I have a serious backlog on reviews and limited time, so no more wittering on a bout the server. A links posts will follow this one – it will be obvious that I’ve not been reading much in the last 3 months either!