It’s hard now, to recollect a moment prior to the impact of pandemic and despite continuous effort to sustain the many open threads of investigation, regular publishing here stalled.
We have been writing using WordPress since 2010, first in response to rising demand for support of CMS development from subscribers and friends and ever since as a regular process.
In September, after six months development and close cooperation with play-workers at Crumbles Castle, the Digital Markers project concluded it’s prototype stage with launch of a very customised and beautifully styled WP site.
It’s a guide that describes use of low cost computers and open software sources for arrangement of co-authored installations around a public place. It’s an evolutionary pathway out of MAZI project and into a very different landscape. With covid at large much of the advocacy for offline and hyper-localised services has been kicked into long grass whilst a swarming around high profile cloud based services, Zoom etc. has drawn much of the attention that has perhaps set back great progress made there.
Now with benefit of a bit of space and time to think again of options, have had opportunity to try out contrasting approaches and lighter payloads of flat file CMS, HTML authoring environments and peer2peer exchange innovations.
The rise of SBC (single board computers) famously Raspberry Pi with it’s many clones and competitors, stimulated a soup of mongrel, experimental and specialised OS offering system solutions. Most of which have been fun to pick up on and test out from Alex’s berry server repository from which we have identified most favourably with DietPi for many reasons, best explored in a more dedicated post.
Right now my favourite quick and clean CMS option is Bludit which features WordPress post extraction plug-in, a liberation from database back-ended and security trip hazards of conventional blogging systems. Regular maintenance and occasional migration of the dozen or more titles has become a major time hog, so pull over to the cold shoulder for a gawp at http://blu.spc.org where you are welcome to continue reading about the work, review and distractions of yours truly in 2021.
If I were able to focus more intently on my peripheral vision, would perhaps prefer to be pushing on with ScuttleButt and delighting in DAT formatted blobs of hip reference and critical comment, alas life’s current distractions outweigh those better intentions. Not that there has been much time for idleness, far from it. Since April, the end of the garden at home in Deptford has drawn in all spare resources, local recycling and free energy of isolation in the construction of a ‘virus shelter’ call it SHED nth, whatever. More about that over on BLU once Christmas lunch is done.
