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Franz Josef Glacier receeding over time
Whilst reading an article about glaciers receeding in New Zealand, I thought this photo looked strangely familiar.
The reason it was strangely familiar being that I didn't remember the snout of the glacier to be so far up the hillside as in the photo of 2016. So I dug around in my albums on Flickr and indeed, the snout had receeded a worrying amount in just under 20 years. So I did some amateur environmental change analysis and added some date lines to my photo: 
This may or may not be due to human made climate change, but this does show the changing climate on a personal level to me. Nature is not always as you might remember it, but changing all the time, for better or worse.
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The Jamstack, will it supplant Wordpress?
The web being the web, there are always opinions on which tool is better, which language superior or which hosting model future proof. The main argument for hosting appears to be traditional CMS (eg Wordpress) vs static sites and headless CMS (eg Netlify). A gentleman's barter was made between Matt Mullenweg and Ohad Eder-Pressman, with Eder-Pressman asserting that the JAMStack will be the dominant architecture by Sept 2025, overtaking Wordpress who currently host over 35% of the top 10K sites. -
Moving to Netlify
I've now moved my site over to Netlify. Having hosted it, at least in part, on Nearlyfreespeech for the best part of 15 years, I have decided to go fully serverless. This is not a slight on Nearlyfreespeech, I have had only positive experiences on Nearlyfreespeech and they will continue to host some legacy files of mine. The main reason for this switch is because I started using Eleventy, a static site generator, to build my site. This is great, it lead to much faster load times. But it meant I had to be on my personal laptop to update the content. I couldn't use an online service to update the site, like I could previously with Wordpress. At least not without a lot of extra effort and technical skills I don't really have. Sure I could create my content in GitHub, but to build and publish the site I needed to run the scripts that were on my laptop. -
Covid vaccination rollout in Europe
With last month's arguments between the EU and UK, regarding vaccine contracts and deliveries I did some back of an envelope analysis. It seems the real issue is not so much contracts, but the general lack of vacciness, partially due to the inability of one specific manufacturer to deliver their promised amounts of vaccines. Here are the stats as of the 10th April 2021:
All data from Our World in Data.Vaccination progress for the EU and UK EU UK Combined Doses given (millions) 93 39 132 Population (millions) 445 68 513 Ratio doses to population 0.21 0.57 0.26 As can be seen from the table if all the vaccine doses administered by the 10th April had been spread evenly across the EU and the UK, the effect on the vaccination rate of the EU would have been minimal: an increase of 5 doses per 100 inhabitants. But in the UK the effect would have been drastic: a decrease of 31 doses per 100 in habitants. So whilst complaints about vaccine export controls and contracts mimicking such export controls might be valid, the real issue is the limited capacity to produce the vaccines. This is where the focus needs to be - not on blaming each other for hoarding vaccines.
Let's get the job done. Stay home! Stay safe!
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Red sky at night...
...sheppard's delight!
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Looking over the Alzette valley from Helmdange onto Keispelt.
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Treasure hunt in Luxembourg
A couple of photos of Luxembourg city at it's best in the lovely spring sun.
Looking over the Abbeye Neumunster and Alzette river in the Grund in Luxembourg City
Looking on to the Red Bridge (also known as Pont Grande-Duchesse Charlotte) over Pfaffenthal and linking the city centre with the European Quarter in Kirchberg
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The value of accessibility
Jeremy Keith recently blogged about the great usability of the UKs Covid vaccination online booking process. Having recently renewed my UK passport online I can only second this. The UKs test and trace system perhaps wasn't world beating. But their Government Digital Service most defintely is!
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JavaScript for the ages
Thanks to a post by Jeremy Keith, I came across this post by Remy Sharp on the changing web and framework fatigue.
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NearlyFreeSpeech.Net
This site is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. I've been using them since 2006 and I couldn't recommend their service highly enough. They are essentially a pay as you go service, where you pay for what you use. This makes them incredibly cheap for low use sites like mine. This site costs me less than $1 a month in hosting charges.
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Privacy - how GDPR is meant to work
Finally a company that has got rid of all non-essential cookies and therefore does not need to annoy it's users with annoying privacy popups, often purposefully designed to confuse you into choosing the least private option. Well done to GitHub for removing all non-essential cookies and getting rid of privacy popups.
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Eleventy, webmentions and my new site
It's finally done. I migrated my site from WordPress to a static site generated by eleventy. I've also managed to get webmentions working of a sort. Many thanks for all the great help available on the internet. I list here some sites I found especially helpful, but of course there are many others who gave me a nudge in the right direction.
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Introducing the ROBIN Stack
Following this idea I saw on Chris Ferdinandi's site, of defining our stacks using our name, I present you the ROBIN stack:
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Welcome Back
Welcome to the fourth redesign of my personal website. I've been working on my own personal website since about 1998. In that time it has had four designs, which roughly follow the evolution of the web.
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Sites I have helped produce
This is a quick overview of all the sites I have produced over time. (As you can see I no longer build sites!) -
Angie
Christmas Day, 2020
Webmentions
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