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Category: metapost

Blogging about blogging.

Move it on over

Published by lafnlab on November 28, 2017

Today I’ve moved my website from Site5 to Dreamhost.

It’s not a decision I made lightly. because moving a site, with all the posts, media, etc is pretty complicated. But for roughly the same price, Dreamhost seems to offer better service and more amenities. The thing that really got me was that Dreamhost offers free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, while Site5 seems to be dragging its heels on this. I suspect Site5 views SSL sales as a profit center. Regardless of whether that’s true, it’s hard to turn down free SSL certificates, thus the move to Dreamhost.

Review Haiku, again

Published by lafnlab on June 24, 2017

Over the past year or so, I notice I haven’t been writing as many Review Haiku. There are a few reasons for this. One reason is that I wasn’t very satisfied with the most recent method of posting them, where I created a static PHP page for each review. While it’s good(-ish) if I want to compile them into an EPUB in the future, it’s also tedious.

Another reason is that I’ve been binge-watching TV series on Netflix and Amazon, and haven’t been watching as many movies. Very few TV series are worth creating a haiku for each episode, so I end up watching a lot of material for very few haiku.

There’s not much I can do about the latter issue, but I think I’ve fixed the former. Recently I took a class at Udemy on WordPress theme development and it was very informative. Since then I’ve created a custom theme, with a custom post type (review) and custom taxonomies for the post type. This past week I’ve been entering the older Review Haiku into WordPress and this page is the result. I hope you enjoy them.

Back again

Published by lafnlab on December 25, 2014

After several months of inactivity, I’ve finally got the blog back up and running, and have done some reorganization. The site has been moved to a new webhost, which has a lot of tools to make it easier to run the site.

The main change to this site is that the Review Haiku will be separate from the blog. When creating an ePub, each haiku is basically an XHTML webpage. To make it easier to create an ePub of Review Haiku in the future, I decided to put each haiku on its own webpage. I used PHP for this mainly to benefit from using templates for the headers and footers, but it should be easy (knock on wood) to use a script to make bulk changes to change the files from PHP to XHTML when making an ePub.

With the Review Haiku separated from the blog, I intend to use the blog mainly… um, as a blog. I’ll probably be blogging a lot about learning Chinese (中文), taking the HSK test, and so on.