Irwin Associates Web Design; modern technology, traditional values

Not just another blog

My most visited website

My most popular site is The Glastonbury Tarot with 1,300 visits daily (25,000 hits) and giving over 2,000 readings each day. This far exceeds the visitors to any of my other, or my clients' sites.

I initially created the site partly for fun and partly as a training exercise. I am fascinated with the tarot and had a reading several years ago at the London Book Fair with Lisa Tenzin-Dolma who created The Glastonbury Tarot. Shortly after that I bought a deck of The Glastonbury Tarot cards and book.

Posted on 26-03-2018 at 13:34

Another client to use the blog platform

It will be a while before the website for which I originally developed the blog scripts will be ready to go live. Meanwhile, another client is considering using it for their latest news. It is something they can update themselves without any input from me.

It's funny how these things happen.

Who knows, perhaps there are other clients for whom this would be a useful feature.

Posted on 12-03-2018 at 19:07

Update on the blog script

I said I would explain more about the blog script I have developed (am developing).

The script uses plain text files with Markdown formatting for the posts. Markdown allows users to include so-called "rich text" features such as headings, italics, bold, unordered (bullet) lists, unordered (numbered) lists, hyperlinks, blockquotes, and more, but stored as simple text files.

No sooner had I started to use the script than I could see 2 or 3 additional features that would be useful.

Initially, the scripts consisted of display blog posts, create post, edit and delete posts. I soon realised I would need an option to save posts as drafts, and I thought it might also be handy to be able to upload images to include within posts. These facilities I've now written. The former I can't show, but to demonstrate the latter, here is a photo of when we had snow 6 years ago.

Snow in 2012

Posted on 07-03-2018 at 14:38

My new blog, my first post

Well, I have started a blog, not because I feel I have a burning desire to say something - or even anything. Rather, I was looking for a simple blogging script that I could add to an existing website, for a client. I could have added a WordPress blog to the site, as I have done for other clients, but it did seem like a sledgehammer to crack a walnut.

So I looked around and found a few possibilities. I wanted the blog to look like part of the website and not like an add-on, and preferred to use flat files rather than databases if at all possible. As I looked at the scripts I had found none seemed to have everything I wanted; they were either not customisable, or not sufficiently so, or were missing something.

As I thought about it, I realised that I could probably write a script myself. I already had many of the components from admin scripts I had written for other sites. So, last Saturday, a dreary wet, windy and rainy day, I set to, to make a start. A couple of hours later and I had the basic display posts page and scripts to create, edit and delete posts.

A further couple of hours on Sunday and I pretty much had a working system, so much so that I decided to give it a test-drive here.

Even if I find nothing else to say, I will write more about the script in a future post or two.

Posted on 04-03-2018 at 14:21

Older posts