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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!

The post Situation Normal appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post More Server Problems appeared first on Stationary Journey.

Until I can make sure the new setting are okay there may still be some instability. Hopefully normal service, i.e. almost complete silence, will resume soon. I am going to do a quick links post though to more thoroughly test out posting later, as it’s well overdue.

The post Server Problems appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post appeared first on Stationary Journey.

[flickr_set id=”72157670829071635″]

The post New Album Added – Walpole Park Ealing 08/07/2016 appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post appeared first on Stationary Journey.

The post appeared first on Stationary Journey.

I recently had the need to timestamp/datestamp a large number of image files using the EXIF data stored in the files. A shell script under Linux was my preferred choice for this, but I’ve always found shell scripting to be cryptic and ImageMagick difficult to master due to the range of tools and command line options. After some searching I came across some useful advice which I adapted for my own needs. The changes I made were to ensure the date followed the UK format, tailoring the colour and size of the stamp to my preferences, as well as providing more useful feedback on progress.

The results are here in case anyone else finds them useful. I haven’t attempted to break long lines in case that introduced errors.

#! /bin/bash

# Based on code here: http://superuser.com/questions/649033/add-timestamp-to-image-from-linux-command-line
# Stored as ~/scripts/stamp.sh, included in path with the following added to .profile:
# PATH=$PATH:"$HOME/scripts"
# Made executable with:
# chmod +x ~/scripts/stamp.sh
# Uncomment the next command for more verbose feedback
# set -x

textcolor="rgb(43,255,0)"
ext="*jpg"

count=$(ls -1 $ext | wc -l)
echo "$count files to be processed"

for img in $ext;
   do stamp=($(identify -format %[EXIF:DateTime] $img))
      full="${stamp[0]:8:2}/${stamp[0]:5:2}/${stamp[0]:0:4} ${stamp[1]}"
      convert "$img" -gravity SouthEast -pointsize 84  -fill $textcolor -weight bold -stroke black -strokewidth 3 -annotate +30+30 "$full" "ts_""$img"
      ((count -= 1))
      echo "Image $img processed, $count remaining"
done

echo "Finished!"

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The post Normal Service Resumed appeared first on Stationary Journey.

This is the final spur that I’ve needed to leave Demon after more than 20 years – they were my first real ISP after using Compuserve and CIX. Demon was a real trailblazer at the time, but the company has changed hands a few times since then and for several years they have only stood out as expensive for the service that they provide. I’ve been a fool to myself for not leaving before now. I’ve signed up with another provider and am just awaiting a MAC authorisation, although from what I’ve seen elsewhere Demon can be obstructive in this regard and the web page I entered my details on gave no acknowledgement that the request had been received. I fear an uphill battle is ahead.

In the meantime I may try a links post if I’m feeling brave, and the occasional update if the move to another ISP doesn’t go smoothly, otherwise normal service will be resumed once the move to the new ISP is complete or I drop below Demon’s capping threshold.

There are other issues affecting the site at the moment. There appears to be a DNS or routing issue on my web host which is stopping the Lifestream plugin from accessing content hosted on the same server, which means that (for example) links bookmarked to Shaarli and aren’t appearing in the Lifestream. This has been reported but has not yet been resolved. The Instagram widget isn’t updating either – that could be related to the other issue or it could mean there has been an API change at Instagram – either way I can’t debug it with such limited connectivity.

The post Timeout appeared first on Stationary Journey.

So I have reverted back to editing in a browser. I had previously found this to be too distracting, so I also tried out WordPress’s “distraction free” full screen editor. Coupled with the “full screen” mode in the browser (F11 in Chrome and Firefox) it really gives a minimalist approach which I think I can live with.

I have also disabled the Visual Editor – I only switched to it once during drafting this post and it mangled some html I had entered. So I have now removed the temptation to use it at all (the profile page in the Admin Dashboard is the place to disable it.)

Having done that and gone into full screen mode, most of the handy buttons (apart from those to insert images and links) have gone. Although I’m fairly competent with html I need the easiest way to show a few words in bold, or insert a heading when necessary. This is where Markdown comes in, which is now available through the Jetpack plugin (it just needs to be enabled).

The following are a few examples of Markdown (Hosted on Pastebin because WordPress insists on transforming some of the characters in the links to html entities):
http://pastebin.com/McvY30RL

And here are the results:

This is a level 2 heading

This is a level 3 heading

This is some normal text. Here is some text in italic, bold and monospace.

• This is a bullet point (the preceding blank line is needed)
• This is a second bullet point

1. This is a numbered list
2. This is the second line – the number used doesn’t matter!

This is quoted text
This is a second line of quoted text

Say I want to put something in *asterisks*

This is a simple link: http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics

This is another link example with a title.

The Markdown Mark comes from here: https://github.com/dcurtis/markdown-mark

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