Well – it has taken some time (and partially explains the lack of posts), but I think I’ve got my personal websites set up “just so” now. The core engine is still WordPress, which is running headless to provide all the content to the front-end. I use WordPress admin to manage the site, write posts, update pages, and so on. The interaction is via WPGraphQL, which took a bit of effort to get working, but provides a nice standard API to access the details. The front end (www.eutony.net) now runs off nextjs, running on a node server. So the majority […]

So, learnt something today. With nextjs “getInitialProps” will run server-side when the page first loads, but then run client-side on reloads (i.e. if you navigate back to it). This means my website breaks if you go “back” to a search results page, as it tries to hit the headless WordPress back-end – which it can’t. So it errors out, and you get this lovely message: Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information). Solution – put the WordPress call behind an api, and then either always hit that api from “getInitialProps”, or work out […]

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ve migrated this website over to nextjs. There is a headless WordPress installation behind it still, but the pages are now pre-rendered and served statically, including pre-loading, so navigation around should be blazing fast. The pages which aren’t pre-rendered are the archive and search pages, which are rendered server-side on demand, with infinite scroll. You’ll notice a few seconds load time for these, which is a reflection of the hardware this is running on. There are were some bits and which didn’t quite work properly yet in this brave new world: The formatting is iffy – […]

Well, the radio silence since May has been for a number of reasons, a large aspect of which was some infrastructure work behind the scenes. I manage to b0rk the pi which hosts this website, but rather than spending ages recreating all the websites, database, config, etc. I decided to put everything into Docker containers, so they can, in theory, be deployed anywhere, and should have a very rapid restore time if anything breaks. All the config files are in source control. So each of my sites running on this host is now in its own Docker container, with an […]

Just a post to mirror the post on my other blog – I’ve decided it’s not the best use of my resources to continue to pay for domain and WordPress hosting for that blog, so in a couple of weeks revjameshandley.com will lapse expire, and my vicar blog will only be available via revjameshandley.wordpress.com. I’ll try and update links from this site. In all honesty blogging has taken something of a back seat in my life at the moment in any case.

Had a very frustrating couple of days fighting WordPress, so I thought I’d share my findings in the hope that someone else may benefit. The slugs incidentally are the part that form the permalink of the page/post – so this post’s slug will be 2022/01/14/wordpress-slug-autocorrect, leading to a permalink of https://www.eutony.net/2022/01/14/wordpress-slug-autocorrect Rather than spin the whole narrative, I’m going to just say upfront – WordPress does not allow you to have pure numeric slugs (e.g. “365” or “123”), and if you try to do this it will ‘autocorrect’ to add a “-2” on the end. Simple as that. In trying […]

In honour of my pending ordination (tomorrow!!) I have set up a new blog, which will (hopefully) be a bit deeper than my ramblings on here. It’s at revjameshandley.wordpress.com I intend to keep this site going with photos, reviews, random thoughts (not that there has been a lot of that recently – doing a theology degree will have that effect!), but my main blogging will now be on t’other site. This isn’t a sacred/secular divide thing, it’s more like the difference between the editorial and the cartoons in the newspaper. I will leave you to decide which one you think […]

Virgin Media just keep on increasing their lowest tier of broadband, at least in this area. This time last year, we have 20Mbps, which was boosted to 50Mbps, and has just been bosted again to 75Mbps. My LAN only runs at 100Mbps! I’m a panelist for broadband speed monitoring, and I quite like the profile of the download and upload speeds over the last 12 months: There’s clearly a bit of instability / variation in the download speeds, as one would expect, which is a shame as it masks the steps up a bit. Still, I like it.

Right – hopefully that’s everything back up and running again! The hack didn’t affect my customised theme (and I’ve restored a clean version from my source-control anyway). I suspect there will be little dark corners that don’t quite work, but the site is looking much like I would expect it to.

My WordPress site apparently got hacked while I was away on holiday (which is why the site went down). I’ve done a fresh installation, but am not going to copy the theme customisations across just yet until I have a chance to make sure nothing’s been compromised!