Smile!
Category: ♻️
When I chose the little icons I use to distinguish the topics in this website, I had a choice of a variety of skin colours, from Caucasian to dark.
However, the light brown face that most closely matched my own skin colour came equipped with a moustache.
I turns out that, forced to make a choice, I identify more as not wearing a moustache than I do with my own skin colour.
I chose science subjects at school, but I’m not a research scientist. Even if I was, I wouldn’t have the time to do all the reading necessary to come to an opinion about the various important debates of the day. So why do I think that the earth isn’t flat? Why aren’t I ambivalent about scientific conspiracy theories?
At school and college, there were the classes and then there was time in the library. I would read magazines such as New Scientist and Scientific American, and biographical books about famous physicists, chemists and mathematicians. What I absorbed was an image of the working life of scientists.
There is the discipline of the scientific method and a global community that communicates to support and to challenge each others’ work. It isn’t perfect, but at some point in the process the community may come to accept a certain view as being the most reliable one.
This is the process that I trust.
The three decisions I made to get from no website to an empty website, ready to start writing were:
- Use WordPress as the CMS
- Use Pressable as the website host
- Make a single website to cover multiple projects
Pressed into WordPress
WordPress is a mess. However, it’s the most commonly used content management system. That means there are a lot of plugins for adding extra features, such as automated tweeting, that make the website run the way I want it to.
Semi-impressed by Pressable
I chose Pressable as my WordPress host because I wanted support from the people that make WordPress.com but with the ability to stage changes in a clone of the site before putting them into production.
They use the same servers as WordPress.com, so I expect them to be reliable. They also have the same quality of support people as WordPress.com, and I’ve found them to be very helpful.
I was disappointed that the built-in backup was only once per day rather than the real time backup that I know they also can provide. The double whammy with the daily backup is that you can’t encourage the backups to happen in a given timeframe, so the backup might happen in the middle of your working day. I’d rather set a batch of tasks, get them done and then know they were part of a set of work. Either they’d all be in production or they’d all be backed out by the restore, but not half and half because the backup happened halfway through a task.
One Website To Rule Them All
I thought about having separate websites for each of the things I write about. This would allow me to use a theme and a set of plugins ideal for each topic. An alternative was to use a single WordPress multi-site. In the end, I decided to use a single site because the content ideas are evolving and I imagine I’ll rearrange the same content many times until I’ve figured out how it’s all going to fit together.