I’ve been toying with a lighter weight solution to one-off pages.
Lighter weight in this instance means “not inside WordPress.”
To that end, here are some new pages:
A Projects Page which talks about some of the things I created and work on regularly.
A Prior Projects Page which is a place for me to talk about prior experiences.
Both are necessarily incomplete. I’ve been doing stuff and making stuff a long time.
And tonight I’ve finally put in some work posting videos of myself bodysurfing. I was incredibly frustrated by the lack of avif support inside WordPress. It turned out not to have been WordPress, but PHP that’s the problem. My site is not ready for a full upgrade to PHP 8, but it’s in progress. AVIF support was added in 8.
And so, here’s a page, or at least the start of a page, showing off brief rides in video.
I had huge mp4 files. At least 10MB each. I was able to use tools to convert these to animated avif files. And further, create jpeg representations of them as well.
Incantations like: ffmpeg -i $mp4_file -r 8 -vf scale=200:-1 $avif_file and ffmpeg -i $avif_file -vf scale=200:-1 $jpeg_file are … intriguing. It’s great to be using tools to automate running such things in bulk rather than having to do each one one at a time.
But I’ve also found changing files of large size rapidly tends to make my CDN unhappy, which means a lot of “clear CDN cache” hokey pokey which is a bit tedious. I have referred to my disdain for video before, and putting the code entirely under my own programming feels better. Learning! It’s… good.
I also will comment on the videos themselves. I capture the videos using Surfline, found via Dawn Patrol and then use Procreate Dreams to add the overlay to highlight myself in the rides.
I’ve also updated my Headers Archive, again. Using the same framework that these other pages are created with:
Lastly: the first page I made using the framework, a mirror of my IndieWeb profile page at /indieweb/
I also removed several more WordPress plugins and replaced their behavior with different mechanisms. I still have some pages to remove from WordPress, for simplicity’s sake. But that change means I also have work to do with regards to making onsite site search work.
WordPress handles search, so any non-WordPress pages aren’t in there. I need to find a solution for that. It’ll need to be an index process to go with a deployment process. I suspect that lives in a Plugin for WordPress that augments search. Or, to create a new search index that can be augmented by WordPress results.
And so… progress!
Tomorrow this blog will be 24 years old. It’s still a reason to learn, to explore, and to create.
I dig it.
