New Improved

Introduction

After many years posting at least once a month, it's been six weeks since my last post. That's a long gap for me. It was brought about by quite a few factors. Some, like the Christmas & New Year holidays, were expected, but others were not (DIY for example).

Back in mid-November, I mentioned I was taking a break from ADLG for at least a year. The plan was to start fresh in 2026. That gave me about six weeks to wrap up all the ADLG posts I’d been planning (plus one that wasn’t). I managed to get the final post done just after Christmas. Since then, I’ve been keeping busy, but mostly behind the scenes.

With the weather grey and overcast, painting was out of the question - one of the drawbacks of relying solely on natural light. Looking for a way to fill the dark days, I turned to a bit of archiving. That small task soon led to some weeding, which in turn became a full-blown project lasting several weeks.

What follows is an account of that venture - a post about blogging and technology. You have been warned!

[1] Site archive

I discovered a ridiculously simple method to get a full, searchable offline copy of this blog on my PC. I just used the Zimit website and the Kiwix deshtop application.

The Waving Flag came in at 86 MB, which isn't bad. It took about three hours for zimit to process. Having downloaded it, it now resides on my hard disc and I can search it without an Internet connection.

This was a really good move and it saved me a lot of work. It's so straightforward I'll probably do it every year from now on.

[2] Dead links

All web sites suffer from link rot. This blog is no different. I used a broken link checker to trawl the pages and report dead links. I fixed as many as I could and removed those where I couldn't find an alternative. I was surprised how many there were, but then again the blog dates back to 2007!

[3] Weeding

As I checked for broken links I realised there were a lot of pages whose time had passed. So began weeks of weeding and generally improving the quality of this blog.

[3.1] Deleting the dross

It's fair to say that I wrote a lot of rubbish in the first two or three years and, for some unknown reason, during 2014-17. I deleted these. If I need to refer to them I have my archive.

This was the second most time consuming activity. I needed to check for dead links after each tranche of deletions. It seemed to take forever. I used Blogger's Media Manager to delete any images from these posts: just to be tidy.

I started tentatively and got more ruthless as time went on. In total I've deleted over 150 posts (almost 25%).

[3.2] Summarising series

A few current and longstanding series, like the 17 Northern League reviews, were redirected to a static summary page. The older posts had little value and the data was repeated in all subsequent posts. Redirecting them made it easier to maintain without losing any information.

Popular, but older & shorter, series were pointed to freshly written summary pages. For example, the series on matting paint with talc now has a summary page. This should make it better for everyone with all the information in one place.

Rather than deleting the original posts I used the "Errors and redirects" section of Blogger's settings to redirect the old pages to the new static page: a very handy feature as it keeps any external links alive. I also added an asterisk to the title of all redirected pages so I could keep track of them.

[4] Improvements

At this point I was getting a bit carried away. I realised there’s plenty on the blog that’s hard to find, some posts that are tricky to read, and quite a few older ones with images that are a bit too small. This led to more work.

[4.1] Better navigation

I created a new static page to act as a focal point for users. The Library page has sections containing links to things like downloads, bibliographies, ADLG resources etc. The Paint Log was updated to include all my painting projects. Both were added to the site wide menu bar.

The pages are all tied together with some very neat html code which creates expandable sections (like this one). It's been a few years since I did any real html coding and I was amazed at what's now possible with very simple coding.

Finally, I rationalised the labels I've been using. I had too many and a few were either over used or redundant. Changing and deleting labels was fairly straightforward as Blogger has some decent label management tools.

[4.2] Stylistic changes

The way I write posts has changed a lot over the years as has Blogger's editing tools (for the better I may add). So I took the opportunity to revise the html and standardise how the posts are formatted; mainly by consistent use of heading tags (h3, h4 etc) and better control of white space (to enhance readability).

At first, this editing filled the gaps while I waited for the link checker's reports, but it soon became a major task in itself. Thankfully, the most recent posts needed very little work. The further back I went the more I had to do. Once I'd spotted the patterns in the changes I was making, I automated as much as I could using a decent text editor.

I took the opportunity to review how I display images in my posts. I've increased the pixel width of the blog a few times since 2007 so early posts had smaller images. I now prefer images to be full width so there was a bit of fiddly editing to achieve this.

Finally, one or two images were poor quality and just too small by modern standards. These were replaced by bigger versions (using a free AI upscaling web site).

[4.3] Page load speed

In addition to the image display size I ensured that the images were the best quality. In the early days I would set an image to be resized by Blogger before it was displayed, but this is not the best way to do things today. Now the full image is downloaded and resized by the browser: bandwidth is far less precious that it used to be.

However, to ensure the images still load quickly, the blog now shows webp versions of all images irrespective of the format of the original. It also uses so-called "lazy image loading". These two settings should mean pages load quickly despite the increased size of the images. I set this up with a combination of Blogger settings and two code blocks added to my Blogger theme.

Closing remarks

As you can see I've been far from idle. However, once I'd finished I was worn out. The thought of writing a new post was very unappealing. I needed a break from Blogger.

Thankfully, I've now recovered and normal service will be resumed soon. I have a number of hobby related posts planned. I just need a decent day to take some photographs.