Category: website stuff

My newspaper publisher blog, stumble.press

Earlier this year I launched a blog to share some short, informal reflections about my life in local news and newspaper publishing. It's called stumble.press. Since it's where I've done almost all of my limited personal writing lately, I thought I should mention it here on my main personal blog.

My posts so far have covered everything from newspaper finances to pet obituaries, from how we went about increasing our subscription rates to stepping away from Twitter/X, from how our metered paywall works to adventures with U.S. Postal Service mail delivery, and from how much disk space a newspaper issue takes up to hiring and management practices. I also occasionally link out to other articles and resources I find useful.

If you're interested in following along on this adventure, you can visit stumble.press, subscribe to the RSS feed, or sign up to get an email notification when there are new posts (just check the box next to "Email about journalism and newspaper publishing posts"). And of course I welcome your feedback and comments.

The artwork for this post was generated by DALL-E 2 from my prompt "a drawing of someone who appears to be drowning in a pile of newspapers."

My new tech and software blog

I've launched a new blog where I'll be posting most all of my future technical writing about technology, software and hardware including release announcements and code examples from my various personal projects, reviews of gadgets and services I use, how-to articles and more. If you'd like to know about new posts there, you can subscribe to the RSS feed or sign up for email notifications.

The latest post is about a new WordPress plugin I released today to help consultants, counselors, wellness professionals, attorneys and others who need to sell access to their time online.

Even though a best practice for blogging in general has always been to find a niche or subject area focus and stick to it, I resisted that for a long time with this main personal blog because I wanted it to encompass all of the various things I think about and work on. In the early days of blogging, I found my audience didn't mind too much that I would post one day about something technical and the next day about something personal and non-technical and the next day about something very specific to my local community; it was easy to hit "next" in their RSS feed reader and move on if they weren't interested in the subject.

Continue reading "My new tech and software blog" →

Better WordPress multisite image URLs

I've been running a personal WordPress multisite instance for several years now, and I use it to host a variety of personal and organizational sites, including this one. I really like the ways it allows me to standardize and consolidate my management of WordPress as a tool, while still allowing a lot of flexibility for customizing my sites just as though they were individual self-hosted sites.

For the most part, my use of WordPress in multisite/network mode doesn't have any user-facing implications, especially since I use the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin to map custom domain names to every site I launch. As far as anyone visiting my sites knows, it's a standalone WordPress site that looks and works like any other.

The one exception to this has been the URL structure for images and other attachments that I upload to any site hosted on this multisite instance. Whereas the typical WordPress image URL might look like this:

https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/my_image.jpg

on a multisite instance, there is an directory structure added in to separate each site's uploads into its own subdirectory:

https://example.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/25/2019/03/my_image.jpg

where 25 might be the site's unique site ID within that multisite setup.

There's nothing wrong with this approach and it certainly makes technical sense if you have lots of sites on your multisite instance that are either subdirectories or subdomains of the main multisite domain.

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Article on Strong Towns

I've been enjoy and appreciating the articles on Strong Towns for a while now. They bring a provocative and practical long-term view to the conversation about how cities and towns in North America can become strong and resilient. Their mission and approach line up so well with the advocacy work I've done in my own community, and the thinking that I see leading to great results in communities around the world.

Now it's an honor to have one of my own essays on community building appear in Strong Towns. I wrote about how to get a response from local leaders when you need to get something done. Most of what I write on RichmondMatters.com is specific to life in Richmond, Indiana, but in this case it turned out that with a few refinements to the original article, the information might be relevant to a national audience.

I hope it helps someone out there find a way forward on positive change they're pursuing in their own town.

My personal website through the years

It's been a few years since I made any big changes to the layout or appearance of this website. So, I took some time recently to make a bunch of updates, and they went live this week. It's now more of a portfolio than just a blog; the new front page does a better job of highlighting the things I'm involved in and have created, and I'll be adding more to that soon.

Mostly I just enjoyed tinkering with it and applying some of the things I've learned recently in creating and supporting WordPress websites for other people. There's some more technical detail below if you're interested.

I also took the time to look back at my personal web presence over the years. I've probably had some kind of "home page" on the Internet and its precursors since the 1980s (BBSes, anyone?) and I know I had a personal site established on the Computer Science department's webserver at my college in 1995, but the earliest archived version I can find is from my 1999 site:

Pretty sparse, but at least it had a forum and a hit counter!

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Getting notifications about my new posts

If you previously followed my writing on ChrisHardie.com via your WordPress.com account, you may have received notifications via email about new posts. I'm turning off that functionality, so you will not receive those emails after this post. If you use the WordPress.com Reader, you may still see new posts appear there. Note that I've also stopped using Facebook to share links to my site.

If you would like to continue to receive email about new posts, or just occasional summary emails, you'll need to subscribe to my mailing list. Follow this link to sign up for email about new content. I'll never share your email with anyone else. And if you've already been getting emails that say "There's a new post from Chris!" then you're all set up on the new list and don't need to do anything else.

Otherwise, you can use a feed reader like Feedly to follow my RSS feed, or just stop by my archives once in a while to see what you're missing.

I write here mostly for fun, but I want to make sure anyone who wants to follow along can do so relatively easily. Contact me if you need more options.

Leaving Facebook

A month ago I deactivated my Facebook account and I haven't used it since.

In the larger scheme of things this is a relatively inconsequential decision, and one that I may even eventually reverse. But for the benefit of my future self, and for anyone else who's interested, I thought I'd inventory my thinking behind this change:

1. My time spent on Facebook was minimal, especially since I deleted the app from my phone a few years ago. But it was almost entirely time I was not spending on things that actually matter to me. Any effort I put in to keeping up with my feed felt like it was actively distorting my understanding of how the real world works, how people are actually doing and what they're actually thinking and feeling. Even as distractions from the real world go, it was often more unsatisfactory and harmful than helpful.

2. I continue to be uncomfortable with Facebook's "walled garden" model of connecting people, content and conversations. I've nothing against the company or the people who work there, and actually admire their technical innovation, scale and impact on the world. But as someone who genuinely wants to see people truly own and control their online presence, I can't in good faith spend time contributing to something that undermines the open web. When I tried being just a casual observer without engaging, it didn't work. Which brings me to:

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Figuring out what to write

I've started about five or six different posts this past week, but none of them have made it to "Publish." No matter how firmly I was convinced when I sat down to write that I would make it through to the end, one of these blogging insecurities always managed to creep in. I was even trashing drafts of tweets, sure that I would just waste some of the most frequently wasted digital space. Ugh.

I want to write about elections and politics in the U.S. But I have spent so much time reading other people's commentary and I'm in such a dark place about finding any hope in political systems that I just don't have anything all that constructive to say.

I want to write about the people I know who have recently died of cancer, or who are struggling with it right now. But I don't have the patience to find words that move through the anger and sadness toward something good, or even useful.

Continue reading "Figuring out what to write" →

Richmond Matters, a new local blog

I've created RichmondMatters.com, a new site dedicated to commentary about life in Richmond, Indiana.

As I've occasionally done here in the past, I'll be sharing my thoughts about Richmond news, politics, leadership, community life and more. It's a simple site. The name is kind of boring. I've no ambition for it beyond having a place to write with a more narrow focus on a topic that's important to me.

Sometimes I'll cross-post those essays here or tweet out links to them, but usually I won't. I'll continue to post here about all the other random stuff I enjoy writing about, but the posts about local stuff will go in this new site.

So, if you'd like to follow along with my posts about Richmond, I hope you'll use the email or RSS subscription options on Richmond Matters. I'd enjoy having your feedback and comments along the way.

Shutting down Richmond Brainstorm

20140322-screenshotFive years ago this month I launched the community improvement website RichmondBrainstorm.com. The site allowed users to submit ideas for ways to make Richmond, Indiana a better place, allowed other users to discuss and vote on those ideas, and shared success stories of ideas that had been implemented. I created the site because I think it's important for a given community to shape its own course for the future instead of waiting for solutions from state and national governments, and because I was tired of hearing good, creative ideas from others that never seemed to get the attention or visibility they deserved.

In the time since, some 86 community improvement ideas were submitted and discussed, and a number of the ideas became real projects that were implemented. The site got over 140,000 visits from around 45,000 unique visitors. I've also received contact from people other communities around the country asking for help to create a similar resource in their city, and so the idea of an online community improvement idea inventory seems to itself have become an idea worth spreading.

But, after an initial period of significant activity, the Richmond Brainstorm site had become largely dormant, with no new ideas submitted to it in close to a year. Over the years I've regularly talked to local community development organizations who have said the concept of the site is an exciting one and could even be integrated into their own efforts at prompting further conversations and action, but as yet Richmond does not seem to be a place where most of those kinds of conversations want to happen online, for better or worse. That combined with the time that it takes to keep the site's software current, deal with spammers and perform other administrative tasks has begun to outweigh the value that I think RichmondBrainstorm.com is currently bringing to the community.

So, as of today I'm shutting the site down.

Continue reading "Shutting down Richmond Brainstorm" →