• Chronic illness has curtailed all my ‘active’ hobbies
• Also, I’ve lost my motivation for this blogging project
• I spend too many days in front of a screen, doom-scrolling
• To break this cycle, I want to focus on my writing — to write faster, more openly, more often

To my surprise, this — my most difficult post to write — soon became the most popular post on my website.

Covid-19 proved a tragic case study in what happens when a national emergency collides with a dysfunctional democracy

— Owen Jones, writing in The Guardian on 27 May 2021

After learning and using Kirby for the last year, I’ve come to see it as a ‘perfect’ blogging platform — but with one missing feature: readers’ comments.

• A long drive to collect Kitty, our new kitten
• I worked super-hard to finish my Covid screen project, but still I missed my Christmas deadline
• A lovely Christmas Day with our daughter and her partner

An elderly gentleman approached me outside our local post office. Looking at my Moulton APB leaning against the post-box, he said: “I’ve got one of these”.

He told me that he still owned one of the original Moulton bikes from the 1980s, and we chatted about it for a few minutes.

Then, out-of-the-blue, he said that he wasn’t able to ride his bike any more, and he offered to give it to me!

• I started a (big, scary) new woodworking project (a Covid screen!)
• I’m still learning PHP, re-learning CSS, and re-re-coding my website
• I only went outside for a few short walks, and just one bike ride
• I’m still trying to avoid getting angry at UK politics
• But I’m very relieved at the US election result — has democracy been saved by this terrible pandemic?

Updated 20 May 2022: For the new version click here — or you can still read the original post below

Responsive web design is an almost universal feature of modern websites, in which page layouts are changed automatically for different devices and screen sizes.

This is not just to make them look better, but (hopefully) also to make them more effective at communicating.

In spite of all its frustrations, I’ve really enjoyed the creative and craft aspects of building my own website.

It’s a lot like woodworking. A chance to make something that’s completely personal, but also well crafted and engineered. Making something out of pixels instead of wood.

Although Kirby now has a powerful new Text Editor plugin, one of the main reasons I chose Kirby in the first place was because of the simplicity and flexibility of its Markdown editor.