03 Nov 2026
My last post was some 4 months ago now, so I should probably write another one. Since then we (i.e. my creative, green-fingered partner) have created a garden allotment, done a bit of actual allotment-ing, saw The Odyssey at the BFI IMAX, went to Folkestone (our regular Victorian jaunt to the seaside) and Dover (a new jaunt for the both of us), bought a new (second hand) car to replace our ageing Micra, finally visited my most local record shop, bought a semi-rare book about megalithics, made a pinhole viewer to see the eclipse, resolved to buy eclipse glasses for the next one, visited Thames Lido, made a rather surprising amount of money selling my old CDs on Vinted, had a curry in Brick Lane for the first time in many years, went to a big wrestling event at Wembley Stadium, got a bit stranded at Wembley Stadium, rode a miniature railway train, took my dad to see West Ham beat Wrexham 6-0, got a weird pain in my neck and rash on my scalp that just seemed to disappear one day, enjoyed plenty of grown-at-home tomatoes, went to see a spectacular gig by Public Service Broadcasting at Ally Pally, went to a talk on end-times fascism (as in warning us of it, it wasn't a promotional event!), and - finally - went to North Yorkshire.
I'll spend some more time on that last one since it was supposed to be my proper holiday. We'd already been to North Yorkshire before and said that we definitely had to go back. We drew up a rough list of what we wanted to see - with a focus on megalithics. This time we made sure to visit the UK's biggest standing stone, Rudston Monolith. Along with it being a fantastic sight in itself for some reason on the day we visited it was completely covered in ladybirds, adding to the mysterious aura of the stone. It also turns out that Rudston Parish Council have given the monolith a suitably great URL, which gave me a chuckle.
We also went on a steam train, for the first time in our lives, on the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. Along with the whimsy of steam train travel the sights from the train are pretty spectacular, and we also enjoyed the view of the abbey and the beers of the local brewery. We spent a little bit of time in York, in particular I like to have a look around the local bookshops and in that respect York didn't disappoint. It's something of a spooky town and during spooky season a visit to Horrifically Good Books is a must-do. The only thing that was a bit of a let-down in York, and maybe this sounds odd, is that The Shambles - a landmark in its own right as an old-school shopping lane - was extremely busy and the shops were predominantly Harry Potter-themed. In case you were wondering if the street has some kind of connection to Harry Potter the answer is "no" - but fans still like to believe it anyway. Bizarre. I guess if you are really into Harry Potter it is good but it detracted from the lane, and it seems like some other shops in other parts of York were also trying to get in on the Harry Potter non-connection. York already has a "thing" - it's haunted!
We also went to visit tumuli (which I only just learned is the plural of tumulus, a burial mound), but found our efforts thwarted at various points. It seems that some are in farm fields, and even though they are notable enough to get their own write-ups, photos and placement on Ordnance Survey maps, farmers have simply ploughed over them. The history has been lost, in some cases for just a few metres of a very large field. In another case there was a quite large burial mound in a field, and we found a gap in the fence so that we could go over to climb it, but it would mean trampling over the farmer's crops. Would it have been so hard to give a notable feature a right-of-way so future generations could appreciate something that was built thousands of years ago? Most maddening of all was finding a tumulus that used to have a right of way, but the farmer has put up fences and "Keep Out" signs to scare off any modern antiquarians like ourselves. According to the Land Registry they don't actually own that land, and certainly it was previously able to be visited. One traveller notes that "access is unusual in that there's no footpath, but the field gates aren't locked. I walked in along the dried up bed of the Gipsey Race, the stream that doubtless so impressed the prehistoric residents of the Wolds." Even that is no longer possible, with whoever thinks they own the land having put a fence up across the dried-up stream. This sort of thing is frustrating enough that we will have to look into getting the access restored somehow, perhaps Ramblers are able to help. Once again: why would you think you have the right to stop people experiencing our history?
Also as a follow-up to my previous post - now a clever person has created bimbo and I can just recommend static site generators to everybody - hurrah! I still need to see how they can work with Obsidian but overall I think this could be a very cool workflow that can make the web easy for everyone. The premium version costs money but it is a one-off purchase and I'm not really against that, if it makes things really simple.
11 Jul 2026
Blog posts two days in a row? I'm truly spoiling you! This one is a little bit different from what I usually like to do, in that I usually like to talk about projects that are ongoing, or I have finished. This one is a project I am still thinking about - because I haven't figured out how to accomplish it.
Two things that I really like are static site generators and Obsidian. This website is made with Zola, with a nice automated workflow so that whenever I commit and push to git it gets published automatically. My brilliant, passionate partner has also developed a love of Obsidian and markdown. We've both discussed how nice it would be to just be able to write blog posts in Obsidian and get it pushed to your website.
Very easy for a developer to do, not so much for someone not as technically-minded. Install command-line programs, install FTP clients, install and correctly use Git. It's all a bit much I fear. I've gone through it a few hundred times and I can't think of a really great way for this to work. Most ways methods I can think of depend on:
- A command-line static site generator to be installed (too awkward)
- An Obsidian plugin (none are exactly what I'm looking for)
- A Git repository with configuration (again, too awkward)
I feel like this used to be a bit simpler. I'm pretty sure I wrote websites in Netscape Composer and uploaded them to some fly-by-night website hosting company easy enough. The idea of Digital Gardens has gained quite a bit of popularity - and yet even the "batteries included" solutions seem to violate at least one of my issues above. None are truly made so that literally anyone can easily do it!
My thinking at the moment is that I should try to create a Python tool that will take an Obsidian vault called "blog" and use a static site generator to turn it into a website. The output of that can then be uploaded somewhere, all using a GUI that the user never has to leave in order to publish. That Python program can be compiled into an executable for all the platforms, and then the user just has to publish through that whenever they want to update their website. It sounds simple enough but that will probably be a pretty huge undertaking.
At the moment this is very much in the "dreams and wishes" stage, and there might be some really obvious solution I am missing, but I think that this could do a lot for people who want to engage with the indie web but just don't have the skills (at the moment) to get started.
10 Jul 2026
A long time ago, I saw an amazing offer. Amazon was offering a free EC2 instance on Amazon Web Services for an entire year. Free cloud computing resources sounds pretty incredible so I used my free trial. I then continued to use it after my year. It wasn't very much, my needs were not particularly egregious, and it was useful to have a VM to run stuff on, that was contactable from the public internet. I'd used my free EC2 instance for quite a few different purposes over the years, but most recently it was hosting Woolymap.
Woolymap was (and essentially still is) a messy Python script that pulls data from websites and REST APIs, then uses a basic Jinja2 template to make an HTML page with predicted departures, previous departures and timetabled departures. It was running in cron every 5 minutes. When I bought my DNS domain I created a subdomain for Woolymap and set it up behind a CDN. I didn't bother making any other changes at all, since it "just worked".
However recently it irked me having to pay Amazon every month for the privilege of running a Python script every 5 minutes. The cost eventually crept up to something like £15 a month, which is hard to justify for such a simple application. I vowed to escape.
The concept of running scripts on someone else's hardware is not new. I decided to try to use GitHub Actions, as they are a fairly decent analogue to cronjobs. I first had to rewrite the script to be suitable to run in a GitHub Action runner. It turns out I way overdid it and had to revert all my refactoring at a much later stage - but I got things running with uv which I am a huge fan of for making Python scripts much easier to handle.
I had initially thought to deploy to Cloudflare Pages - but I realised that's quite unnecessary when GitHub Pages are right there, available for free. I put my configuration together and waited for the first run. And I waited. And then I waited some more. It turns out if you are on a free GitHub plan that your GitHub Actions schedule is very much not guaranteed. When you need to run every 5 minutes that is a problem. Luckily an intrepid adventurer had left breadcrumbs. Now all I needed was an external service to fire HTTP requests at 5 minute intervals. I didn't really know what to use for that but luckily Cron-Job.org exists and it works perfectly! My creation lives!
I then just had to hook up the GitHub Pages setup to my DNS provider (Cloudflare) so I could restore the access via the usual URL. It took a while to apply correctly but it works! I had one last step, to delete my EC2 instance and then completely close my AWS account. I had no desire to ever use their services again (outside of my professional life) and it felt good to completely cancel the account.
I'm aware this solution is still contingent on a free account on GitHub (massive tech company owned by Microsoft), a free account on Cloudflare (massive tech company that is basically now a load-bearing piece of the modern web) and a free account on Cron-Job.org (completely free and open source, but you can optionally support them for as little as 12 Euros a year). At some point I'd love to go with fully open source providers and pay them (now I'm saving £15 a month) but for now I'm happy with my escape.