Continuing my archival project at Detail, here are two more galleries from 1991–92, when I was studying in England. These ones cover London and the rest of England (and a bit of Wales), and include some photos from a trip around the British Isles with my parents at the end of my studies. There are at least four more galleries in this series to come, when I get the chance to work on them.
I spent a few days driving back and forth to Glentress with the kids last week, while they did separate mountain biking courses with Dirt School. While one was on a course I rode with the other, although rain on the second and third days slowed us down a bit. It was a chance to take some more photos of the place to flesh out the gallery I posted last year at Detail. Here are the new ones in their own right.
Time for another archival instalment at Detail. On my flight to England in 1991 I was with KLM, which meant my first stop at Schiphol Airport and my first visit to Amsterdam. Over two days I took in the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum, the Anne Frank House and a canal boat tour, on which I took most of my photos. In this gallery I’ve converted a few to black and white to deal with the reddening effects of a light leak at the end of a roll, but they look fine. If I ever get to 1998 in my marathon scanning project I’ll add some photos from my second visit to the city, but for now, grab a stroopwafel and enjoy the show.
There’s a new detail at Detail: having made an index of galleries by region, I’ve now added one of galleries by date, so that I can see more easily what’s missing, and you can see where I’ve been when. There’s a lot of scanning of 1990s photos still to do, and even some revisiting of photos and old galleries from the 2000s.
Late last year my webhost suddenly switched from MySQL to MariaDB for its back-end databases, which meant that my aging installation of Movable Type, which had powered this blog for a decade and a half, stopped working. Short of finding a new host, paying a fortune for a newer Pro version of MT, or adding individual posts by hand indefinitely, my best option was to make the switch to WordPress, which I’d tentatively started with a blog project in 2015. I figured I’d switch over in 2020 so that the static archives from before the start of the year could persist unchanged.
Moving the site across has been a complicated process, and isn’t finished yet. I thought I’d keep track of some of the tips and posts I found along the way that made it possible.
Memories of England in better times, when HMV and Parrot Records were full of Carter USM albums emblazoned with the flag of Europe. I spent nine of the happiest months of my life studying here as a Masters student, thinking deep thoughts, making good friends, performing onstage. I carried my 35mm camera around at times, taking about a hundred photos of the town over the course of those nine months, another laughably small number compared with what I would have taken in digital. I’ve finally scanned them and sorted them into a gallery for Detail. Take a punt:
Some dead-ends in my WordPress theme-hacking attempts left me with one that almost works but misses some crucial post navigation links, which has put me off posting here for a few weeks. (That, and starting a new semester and a new course.) I’ll keep trying, but in the meantime might switch this back to a boring default for a while.
I’ve been tinkering with this blog for the past week, but am torn on how to handle it. A guide on developing a WordPress theme from scratch got me to the point where everything looks like the old Movable Type templates, but fine-tuning the post navigation links and the comments formatting will need much closer engagement with the fine details of WordPress development, and will take hours and hours. Should I give up and revert to a standard theme with a bit of personalisation, or persist until the site feels like itself? Wait and see, I guess.
The move to WordPress appears to have gone as well as it could have, with the other blog preserved and this one working seamlessly, although I’ll have to find a workaround for the RSS feed, which clashes with an old site area of the same URL. This WordPress template is a bit blah, too, so days of figuring out how to write my own themes no doubt lie ahead.
Meanwhile, the previous post provides links to all the old areas of the site until I can get them on the sidebar here.
Happy new year!