Lockdown Reboot

Here in the UK, we are now two months into the lockdown triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic. To tackle the frustration of not being able to go out, I’ve been using the time to finish building the next version of this website.

While I’ve not completely finished everything I want to do with the site, I decided it was a good time to put it live. I’m pleased with the end result and hope others will like it too.

Throughout the rebuild I have used the Lighthouse audit tools built into the Chrome browser to monitor things like performance, accessibility and SEO. These were the final results, which I am really pleased with (although I still plan on making further improvements):

If you compare these with the results from the previous version of the site, you can see improvements across the board:

The vast majority of the content has been kept, along with their URLs to avoid broken links. However, I have decided to drop the old plugins section as this had become redundant over the last few years; I mostly host the content that was there over on GitHub now. I also no longer support my old Textpattern plugins as, after many years of using the CMS, I no longer use it for any of my sites (I outgrew it, but it is still a decent application).

Since 2018, I have been giving talks at local user groups, and had several planned for 2020. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic most of this year’s talks were postponed. Regardless, I decided to include a new section on this site for my talks so that people can see what I have been speaking on, and any upcoming talks.

Anyway, this is my new site. I hope you enjoy it.