Just read Git Commit Messages by Angie Herrera who has started organising Git Commit Messages "in a way that keeps things organized and makes future me a bit happier and less stressed".

What a great idea!

I decided I am going to do the same – so I copied Angie's bullet points into a Note and then started thinking about it. Angie is a very accomplished Craft CMS developer, who I have been honoured to provide some SEO work, so the list makes perfect sense for a Craft build. However with 11ty builds I needed something a little more because I am now also making content changes in my 11ty builds.

So here is my extended version:

• feat: anything feature related, even if deleting code or making changes to existing features
• fix: fixing a bug or issue without new feature code
• refactor: code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature but somehow improves the codebase (for me this is usually streamlining CSS)
• cms: changes to the CMS (version updates or plugin updates, installs, or removals)
• build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies, such as npm, DDEV setup, or Laravel Mix.
• content: New content, images and typo fixes and corrections
• seo: Changes optimising code or content for seo purposes

That should see me right!

I upgraded the image plugin for 11ty on a small site which had an unintended chain of issues!

I noticed that the Source control had node elements in it, even though I have node_modules in my gitignore file. After some investigation and testing I realised that I must have deployed the site before adding the gitignore. Really should not have node_modules deployed to the repository even though it is private.

To remove the node_modules from the repository I moved the folder up a level and committed and synced the files. That removed the node_modules from the repository. I then moved the node_modules folder back into the local site and ran a build - all was ok.

I checked Netlify and the build had failed.

It turned out (i.e. head scratching and testing for a while) is wasn't my local Node but the Node version on Netlify that needed upgrading - of course it was.

With the node_modules in the build, Netlify had used the node_modules I had provided to create the build - which is a great feature but not what was needed. As soon as I had removed them Netlify used the default node_modules which failed to build because apparently node needed upgrading.

On the Netlify Site Configuration > Build & Deploy > Dependency management (scroll down) to find and configure the Netlify version of Node - it was 15 and I apparently needed 18, so set to 20. Bingo - built and deployed magnificently!

I hope this note helps someone but it is really for me the next time I get this issue on another site and don't realise I fixed it before.

I read a short post on Mastodon from Pierre Carrier saying that his blog had a newspaper mode - and it looks great! Pierre has his site on 11ty, as my site currently is, so I thought I would have a quick go at building a newspaper version of my content - the Simon Cox Evening News.

First off I didn't want to change any of the code for my site and this would be on one page only - not a toggle between site designs. 11ty automatically builds collections to gather content into groups so with testing I picked my Shorts collection of posts and built a small piece of html to reiterate over each story - that pulls in the heading, link and content etc.

This gave me a long page of content. What I wanted to do was have columns of content. CSS grid sprang to mind but of course it segments articles into blocks with spaces in the rows, so that would not work. A masonary type approach might work - but that runs in rows. So I went back to an old favourite that, in my opinion, does not get used enough on the web - columns. This is really old CSS and for various reasons designers appear not to like it - control of the flow being one of them.

The design and html for the page is standalone - it does not uses any of the CSS or templates from the rest of the site.

I had some issues:

• Initially I set media breakpoints for the number of columns to give a responsive layout depending on viewport size. Pierre rightly asked why I had not set the column widths and he was spot on - that was a much better approach.
• Image widths had to be set to width of 100% to fill the column correctly but some were smaller than the columns widths so Max-width 100% was used.
• I was getting a lot of white space to the right meaning there was a lot of horizontal scrolling which was not great. I eventually tracked this down to the pre tag, that I was wrapping code in, needing white-space: pre-wrap; in the css.
• I had used the Shorts collection to test and swapped that to my posts collection to do a second test. What I really wanted to do was both and I thought I would have to set up a new filter in 11ty to do that bet remembered I have already done this for the rss feed – so I was able to use the feed collection! 11ty does make this kind of thing easy!

Once I had the layout sorted I added some enhancements.

• The images and links were in colour and I wanted an old newspaper feel. I added filter:grayscale(1) brightness(80%) contrast(150%); mix-blend-mode: hard-light; to the container making everything monochrome without touching the source content.
• background - a seamless crumpled paper image.
• post titles were set in Playfair Bold and the kerning tightened.

Things to do: I was hoping to add some filters to make the images look like halftones but after a lot of experimentation it has eluded me. There are some lovely online codepens and blog posts on halftones for this but I could not get them to work without changing the posts underlying code. I may come back to this in the future.

As Seth Goldstein said It's overwhelming but he is a recovering journalist.

Anyway - here it is - the Simon Cox Evening News.

Update

15 Sept 2024

I have added a couple of extra pages that filter the Articles and Short articles so it is a little bit easier to read. Not sure this will have a huge amount of traffic as it is more of an excercise! I am, of course, monitoring what happens from an SEO aspect - always testing!

A week ago I started having issues with my home network, a network that I had built up and improved over the years.

The first step in this was when we moved to this house and BT provided us with a couple of Powerline networking sockets. This allowed us to run a simple network between the router and the BT YouView box across our mains electric circuit. Usually this happens with wifi but because half of our house is over 200 years old that didn't work.

Powerline

I love the idea of Powerline. It utilises the mains cabling in your house to network across, saving the cost of installing dedicated ethernet cables. It isn't quite as good a dedicated ethernet cabling, and can be subject to interference, but you do get gigabyte speeds across it.

The Powerline adapters that BT provided were made in Kent by a small firm which closed down. I managed to buy three second hand ones on ebay and built up a network across the house for our workstations and a raid drive. It all worked fantastically well except for the wifi coverage, used by our phones which would switch to 4G without us realising. That caused issues with data allowances.

So in time I upgraded our Powerline network with 5 Devolo Magic 2 adapters. Each of these adapters also had wifi so I was able to mesh the whole house on the same wifi network. And all was good.

Except it wasn't.

Outages

In the evenings we would get outages on the network. I could see the led on the Devolo next to the TV turn red for a few seconds. If we were watching any streaming service on the TV it would then buffer. This also caused issues with the wifi network as that would also stop for no apparent reason - though the reason was the devolo's had lost connection with the router.

Split the wifi in two

Eventually I had to split the wifi network into two. I got a BT Wifi Disk and extended the wifi but that still only covered about two thirds of the house (it's not that big either!).

We lived with this set up for several years. I'd have to reboot the Devolo networks in the evening, using my iphone, and that stopped the buffering.

A week ago the devolo network stopped connecting altogether and I spent a couple of days trying to work out what the issue was. And failed.

Lightning killed the ethernet ports

We had replaced our router due to a lightning strike that knocked out the ethernet ports in the past. I thought that might have happened again and got the hub replaced again. BT suggested they send us another Wifi disk to extend the range. I thought we could only have one wifi Disk but you can have up to three!

Wifi to the rescue

Having added the extra Wifi disk we now have wifi across the whole house and a lot of the garden. This will make mowing while listening to Test Match Special possible.

I have removed all the Devolo Powerline adapters and we now run everything through wifi. I might be saving a bit on the electrical bill as well as the Devolos do run very hot. Internet searches have suggested that this may cause issues with them.

Summary

Powerline is great but the electrical circuits in our old house are a bit odd.

Wifi is a bit slower than Powerline, but a lot faster then Powerline that doesn't connect.

Devolo Magic Powerlines run hot. I do not recommend them.

Changing devices to a new wifi password is tiresome - lot of resetting. Try and avoid it.

That's odd I though - does Mousehole actually have cobbled streets? As lovely as it is with Stargazy pie, traditionally eaten on Tom Bawcock's Eve, and the last person to speak Cornish as their first language to live there, Dolly Pentreath, but I'm not sure it is known for its cobbled streets. Mousehole no longer has cobbled streets.

I do know the beautiful tourist trap of Clovelly has the iconic cobbled pathways through the village down to their harbour - but that's not even in Cornwall, it is in North Devon.

So whats going on? Why would a Cornish website - CornwallLive - tell untruths?

Well it was not CornwallLive that actually first published this story (11 July 2024), it appears to be the Daily Express.

Hmmm, that's an oddly familiar headline and name. When you compare the two stories it seems all Jeff has done is run Lauras text through chat GPT to change it just enough to stop any duplication algo's picking it up.

Laura's 3rd paragraph:

Jeff's 3rd Paragraph

Oh wait - Jeff also writes for DevonLive

This really looks like the cobbled streets aspect was made up to get traffic to the sites so they can sell advertising - and there is a lot on all those sites. The argument is that local news sites need advertising to be able to operate but stories like this are just rehashed and wrong - there is no local news left on local news sites – it's just all click bait.

It is exactly this type of reporting that has killed off local newspapers and why your high street has the same shops as my high street and any other high street. Always follow the money.

More of a reminder for myself next time Image need to do this!

Adding a collection tag to a post as a link

There are some lovely ways to automate sets of tags with a list page. Hoever I don't think these can have additional content to make them into a proper topic hub page so I am building them out manually.

For posts in my Articles and Shorts sections I have started adding tags to the modelling topic ones. After the author sign off with date, and update date if there is one, I have added links to the tag hub page.

I started with this 11ty code:

{% if tag == "Modelling" %}| <a href="/narrow-gauge-modelling">Modelling</a>{% endif %}
{% if tag == "Loxley" %}| <a href="/loxleybarton">Loxley Barton Falls</a>{% endif %} 

But it wasn't showing up the tag links. Turns out that because I have multiple tags on some in this form:

tags:
- Loxley
- Modelling

Turns out that 11ty concatentates them as a string, of course, so I need to cycle through that and pull out the tags that I need.

This gave me:

{% for tag in tags %} 
  {% if tag == "Modelling" %}| <a href="/narrow-gauge-modelling">Modelling</a>{% endif %}
  {% if tag == "Loxley" %}| <a href="/loxleybarton">Loxley Barton Falls</a>{% endif %}
{%- endfor %}

Which works perfectly. I am sure there is a more robust method but for now, for me, this is working great!

I switched all my small projects over to Fathom Analytics in 2023 for various reasons but there was one page on my site where I kept the Google Analytics code - the 404 page.

I did this so that I could pull the data into a Looker Studio dashboard to provide me with errant URLs being visited on my site.

The above image shows a classic example of a URL that didn't exist on my site. Not sure how someone got this wrong but they have missed one letter, 'e' out of the URL thus breaking it! They have put:

/post/2010-02-04-th-perfect-angle-to-staple-paper/

when the actual page is at:

/post/2010-02-04-the-perfect-angle-to-staple-paper/

And it had nine visits (probably the same person wondering why the link was going to my 404 page - so they may have fixed it.)

So the report is super useful to see what is going on under the hood.

Why do I want to see what is happening on my 404 page?

Well, broken URLs in my site can usually be found quite easily by running a crawler across the site and fixing anything that breaks but there is the odd occasion where someone linking to my site uses an old URL or creates a URL with a typo in it - essentially they have created a broken link to my site and I don't know who has done that and I can't ask them to fix it.

With the old URLs I have redirects in place to catch them but for new broken URLs I don't know they exist unless I can track the referrer. So that's what I have been doing.

Set up the Redirects

When I get a new broken link I can add a line to my redirects file to redirect that to the appropriate page if one exists. If it is not obvious where to send the traffic then I still let is resolve to the 404 page.

Creating this report in Fathom Analytics

I thought I should be able to create a similar report using Fathom Analytics so read the Creating and using events documentation and it looked like I could set an event up and track them there.

This code looked good so I tried it:

<script>
window.addEventListener('load', (event) => {
  fathom.trackEvent('checkout completed');
});
</script>

All I needed to do was change the checkout completed to 404. It worked but of course only told me that there was a 404 event. I needed more data from the script - I needed the URL. Javasripty people will be well ahead of me now and using the word 'just' a lot but despite using the fabulous 11ty for this site I really can't cope with much more than a sprinkle of javascript.

Fathom to the rescue

So I contacted Fathom Analytics, and told them what I was trying to do. The wonderful Paul Jarvis came back with the code I needed and even tested it out before sending it to me!

Here is the code I have ended up using - courtesy of Paul.

<script>
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
    var path = window.location.pathname;
    fathom.trackEvent('404: ' + path);
  });
</script>	

On testing, I now get the following report in my Fathom Dashboard:

That allows me to spot 404 URL errors and set up new redirects for them!

Fathom Analytics

Thank you Paul Jarvis for your help on this. If you are interested in Fathom Analytics, this is my affiliate linky.

Update

Paul has already added this technique to the Fathom documentation!

I read a couple of articles this week on cleaning up your 11ty config file, the initial one that I found from Robin Hoover and the second from Lene Saile in which Lene had added a 3rd method, adding another config file as a plugin which I then understood what I could do. Yes takes me a bit of time sometimes.

I created a new folder named _11ty in my source folder and in that added new .js files for each of the plugins, functions, filters and collections I needed, and in each added the code for them. This included the module.exports section but with slightly changed code.

plugin.js code example:

const CleanCSS = require("clean-css");

module.exports = eleventyConfig => {
  eleventyConfig.addFilter("cssmin", function(code) {
    return new CleanCSS({}).minify(code).styles;
  });
};

The module.exports line has changed from:

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {

to

module.exports = eleventyConfig => {

With all the plugin and filter code tucked into its own file for convenience and ease of maintenance my .eleventy.js file now looks like this:

module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
  // Plugins
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(require("./src/_11ty/cssmini.js")); // CSS minification
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(require("./src/_11ty/rss.js")); // RSS feed plugin
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(require("./src/_11ty/datetime.js")); // Date Time plugin
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(require("./src/_11ty/collections.js")); // Collections
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(require("./src/_11ty/image.js")); // Image plugin
  eleventyConfig.addPlugin(require("./src/_11ty/passthroughs.js")); // passthroughs

  return {
    dir: {
      input: "src",
      output: "public"
    }
  }
};

You can see the paths to each plug in I have used.

Yes, this is more of a note to myself for the next time I need to do this but I hope it helps someone else too!

Set up a draft system in 11ty

Now this and a few other sites I have are running on 11ty I have been meaning to add a way of marking a post as a draft while I am writing it - just in case I need to publish a short while getting an article ready.

There are several complex explanations of how to do this out there including one from Remy Sharps from 2019 and the Quick Tip in the 11ty docs. I am sure they are all great but I wanted something simple and easy to use and I didn't need to schedule anything - well not yet anyway.

I found this one on github from Peter Dehaan which explained how this works easily enough for me to comprehend and implement.

With the added src.11tydata.js file all I need to is add a draft: true to the front matter and the post will not be included in the build, including lists of posts, my mxl sitemap and my rss feed.

---
title: 11ty draft posts
description: Setting a post to draft in 11ty while writing
topic: web
draft: true
---

Update 2024/11/25

There has been un update in 11ty v3 with an easier method

I have recently changed the lastmod date in my xml site map to be accurate now that Google are wanting that. Part of what Google wanted was for the page to state the update date on it. I pulled this data from the posts front matter but because I had set an 11ty filter for the sitemap the output on the page was the full UTC:

Updated: 2023-04-03T00:00:00.000

The resolution was to add .toDateString() to the front matter item, dateUpdated, in the template giving me:

dateUpdated.toDateString()

Which displays as:

Updated: Mon Apr 03 2023

Far better!

Just deployed a site using the 11ty image plugin and it is working well. I did have some issues with set up - wanted the hi-res images in a separate folder outside of src and public folders and acheived that by setting an external source - would be nice if this were in the base set up:

let imageSrc = `hi-res-images/${src}`;
let metadata = await Image(imageSrc, {    
widths: [180, 343, 647, 1200],

And then the shortcode in the functions:

eleventyConfig.addAsyncShortcode("image", imageShortcode);

But then I was having issues where the image shown on full screen was the low res version - not good! Took me an age to work out the issue till I noticed some errant code in the source.

In Markdown please leave a space before and after the image shortcode - else it gets mixed up and bits of the picture element get wrapped in a p tag and become not a picture element!

This doesn't work:

Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla
% image "image.jpg", "alt text" %
Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla

But this does:

Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla

% image "image.jpg", "alt text" %

Lorum ipsum dolar bla bla

Leave some space!

In February 2023 I discovered I had an issue with crawling a site after some changes. I like to fix things to make websites work properly so often go through several itterations of the code fixing things.

The same issue cropped up again in June 2023 so I thought I had better post a Short about it to remind myself rather than just moan about it on Mastodon! When running a crawler, such as Sitebulb, Screaming Frog or SEO PowerSuite, against a site on Netlify you could hit the prerender cache. The same happens when you test a page in Google Search Console but the real Google crawler is ok. To get the real results either wait 48 hours and crawl or change the crawler User Agent to something else, such as Safari, and rerun the crawl.

There is a very good explanation of what's happening on the Netlify support pages.

I have knocked up a 3D chassis for the Stanton Coach I am designing.

I am on about v 3 of the coach bodywork at the moment and after a lot of thought around the chassis and how to create it including from kraft board, etched parts (which I may yet still do) and the 3D print option whihch on reflection seems the simplest and obvious one! This is designed for a pair of bogies to be fitted with bolts as is common in 4mm scale 009 coach modelling.

I have a couple of 11ty built sites that are auto deployed out to Cloudflare Pages. I normally prefer Netlify for the hosting but I do like to keep some eggs in other baskets.

I updated a site yesterday and it kept failing the deploy to Cloudflare with the error stating that Node had to be at least version 14. I checked my local Node version and it was 19.3.0. So I changed my gitignore to allow the node files to be in the deploy in the hope that this would enable Cloudflare to build out the pages correctly.(Then I had issues with Git Authentication - another post another day on this perhaps but I had to restart my Mac to get the Auth to work.) That did not work.

Turns out you have to set the Environment Variables for Node to work. This seems a bit of a faf and must be new in Cloudflare since March - the last time I deployed this site. Not sure why they have complicated things.

Navigate to Pages > site > Settings > Environment Variables and set up a new variable named NODE_VERSION and I put the version I am using in there.

And the next deployment worked!

Update 2024-09-29

On reflection this may have only happened when Cloudflare increased their minimum version of Node. Even though I was using 19.3.0 Cloudflare appears not to be detecting the version you have used, even though that is in the package.json, and relies on you setting it in the Environment Variables. This certainly does allow easy customisation but could be automated.

What is INP?

INP means Interaction to Next Paint and will be part of the Core Web Vitals measurements from March 2024.

Will INP affect my rankings?

Probably not in most cases but it could be the tipping point between your page and another page being ranked higher in the Search Engine Results Pages so it should be considered as part of the sites usability.

Where can I learn more about INP?

You can learn more about Interaction to Next Paint from Google's web.dev site.

Is there a viable alternative to Google Analytics?

Yes, Fathom Analytics is a more than capable alternative to Google Analytics and is from a small independent team in Canada.

Like most people who build websites I have been using Google Analytics for many years. The change to GA4 this year though is significant. Having used GA4 for over a year I can attest that it is OK - difficult to understand to begin with but that's because it uses a different data model that the outgoing Universal Google Analytics. GA4 is very customisable, which is great, and I have been able to put together several dashboards for SEO related data. However there is one big issue looming on the horizon.

How far back can I look at my Google Analytics data?

16 months is all you will be able to review making seasonal comparisons much more difficult. Google Universal Analytics will sunset on July 1st 2023 and currently the data will be available for 12 months and then it gets deleted, forever.

Seasonal comparisons are important but we have not really had a normal year since 2019 8so only being able to compare traffic data from last year doesn't hold any comfort for me.

I had heard about Fathom Analytics some years ago and liked the idea but it is not free like Google Analytics but it is inexpensive. The big factor for me though is that they have just launched the ability to pull your data from Google Analytics into Fathom.

This left me with a data gap though as I had switched my Analytics from GA Universal to GA4 in February but I was able to then import my GA4 data from February to today using the date feature! So I have combined all the available data and ported into Fathom!

Do we need a neck tag in html?

The neck tag doesn't exists in html but if it did I have a use case for it.

Dave Smart made a suggestion on Mastodon:

<head>, <body> but no <neck>? 
Where do I put the <meta name="trachea" > tag. 

Madness.

I thought about this for a while and realised that there is a use case. Sometimes scripts in a head tag can break the head. If you have an advertising tag, your advertising team might inadvertently add a tag, such as iframe, that is only mean to be used in the body - and the way Google, and other crawlers, interpret the head mean that they stop reading head tags as soon as they come across a body tag. The assumption is that perhaps the body tag was missed and that is fair as the only tag that is actually required to be used in html is the title tag. This means that any head tags after the script are ignored. The best practice is to put all scripts last in the head but if we had a neck tag they could go in there.

Just a thought.

What is myrm.club?

myrm.club is a new way to display your model railway layouts so that people can find them quickly. I have created a page for each of my layouts and an overall page for Simon's Narrow Gauge Model Railway Layouts.

It is a model railway showcase so will not be updated very often and I will tend to go into more detail about builds here.

Last week we were hit by a sudden storm. We missed the sky clouding over, it was very quick and then there was an almighty flash and instand thunder that shook the whole house.

Our power went off before the thunderclap stoppped. It was a bit of a shock but the electricity came back on failry quickly and that sometimes causes issues. I checked the lightning app I have and could see a couple of hundred yards up the road. We had not been hit but were shook up! Then we realised we had no broadband. After checks I realised we had lost a base powerline unit so I ordered a new one.

It wasn't for another three days with patch wifi cover over the house that I worked out that the ethernet ports in the Router had also been fried. Hopefully, the new router will arrive this week but we realised how much we rely on internet services for our everyday life - even the radio stations we listen to come through the internet.

I will be recreating our home mesh wifi slightly differently this time around and now have a spare base unit for the Lan - just in case! There was a second lightening up in the village and a lot of people getting replacement routers over the weekend!

The AI revolution really began in 2022 for the common person but 2023 is the year where it really took off. Whilst everyone is trying to get the most out of ChatGPT, already on v4 Google Released its own text prompt AI yesterday called Bard and it is fast. I was able to pull in information from live URLs unlike ChatGPT which has a LLM that is at least 2 years old.

It is, however, the Ai image space that has interested me the most and Midjourney v5 was released last week with a significant jump in quality to the point where it can be difficult to tell the creations are not real photos.

Whilst I say AI, it is not true Artificial Intelligence but we are getting closer to that.

The image below I generated using Midjourney – wasn't quite what I wanted even after several attempts but it is photographic and he has the right number of fingers! However if you look at the laptop there is no keyboard...

Google Search Console sends out automated emails for issues including the 'Page with redirect' as an issue. If that's expected behaviour – you have changed a page URL and added the redirect – then check your sitemap.xml. Hopefully that's automatically updated but GSC may have a cached version and still thinks the URL is present - hence the Error warning. To fix this resubmit the sitemap.xml in GSC to update their understanding of your sites URLs.

GSC was flagging some Canonical issue on this site so I decided to add the canonical using the page.url parameter in my base.njk nunjucks include.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.simoncox.com{{ page.url }}">

However, I have already included a Canonical in the frontmatter of some of my posts and there may be reasons why i'd want the canonical to be on a different url. So I added a conditional to state that if the frontmatter for canonical exists then use it else fall back to the standard page url version. And that gave me this:
{% if canonical %}<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical }}">{% else %}<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.simoncox.com{{ page.url }}">{% endif %}

Simple but effective. ^ to MrQuest for the tip showing me how to display raw njk code!

I don't have a games console but really wanted to play Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out and Google Released it on Stadia so I go the package. It included a Chromecast Ultra and a very nice hand controller. Sadly, as with many Google forays, they decided to Sunset Stadia and it closed down on the 18th Jan 2023. The controllers bluetooth was locked out but they have released instructions on how to enable it for use with any bluetooth device - happy gaming!

I realised that the sitemap.xml file was listing the 404 page - we really don't want that in there as the search engines don't want it. The 11ty sitemap.njk file had the answer in its frontmatter for any page you don't want in a collection, and that includes the All collection, I added this in the frontmatter of the 404 page:

eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true

And then any page I want to manually jeep out of the sitemap I can add sitemapIgnore: true to the frontmatter.

I have tried to add Webmentions to the site having read Max Böck's post on this and then Chris Bongers post - both very helpful and bewildering at the same time! Have found my natural limit again having got so far with 11ty!

No issues with coding the pages up as and when I need but if I am on the go somewhere making changes to the site will have to wait - except that I have now installed the Netlify CMS! It's very lightweight for a CMS and is based on the 11ty Collections so static page changes are a little more difficult but posts are ok - such as this one. More info on Netlify CMS.

Many many years ago I owned a Spectrum +3 computer. For some nostalgia the Spectrum +3 operating manual is online. My friend Nick and I programmed a D&D Character generator in Basic on these. Took us months to do and then we added and added to it. Did it just for our own games. I then developed a font for use on our dot matrix printers for the output too! We also created a weather generator for our games so we could factor that into the game campaigns. At the time D&D was sneered at as being childish so we never told anyone what we had built. How times have changed.

There are many 11ty resources available but the one that I started with to get me going is Kevin Powell's Turn static HTML/CSS into a blog with CMS using the JAMStack and I keep going back to it!

Minifying css for 11ty sites is quick and simple. Quick Tip #001—Inline minified CSS Using the CleanCSS plugin and moving the css file to _includes and then pulling the code into one line in the base.njk head.

A recent Mastodon post and blog post about writing less from Matt Gemmell made me think about the old short posts this site used to have. They were quick thoughts and links to remember for the future so I am starting them up again and I will be adding some of the old ones back onto the site.

Loxley Barton Falls will be at Brighton Model World Exhibition this year. I have just had the invite paperwork through as a late invite (something about loosing my details!). I see that there are four other 009 layouts at the show which is not bad going for a general modelling exhibition.

Brighton Model World is on the 15th -17th February at the Brighton Centre on Brighton sea front. Apparently they have model ships, life size Daleks, radio controlled things and loads of other modelling stuff as well as railways so it should be entertaining thought the longest event I will have done. Having agreed to attend when invited last year I had not realised that it was the same weekend as the Small and Delightful's Narrow Gauge South West show in Shepton Mallet - a favourite exhibition of mine - though I have not been invited to exhibit yet... (ahem..)

See you at Brighton!

I have had one of Nigel Lawton's Bachmann re-motoring kits for a long time now and one of my engines packed up recently so i set about my first bit of modelling for the first time in a few months. Why does everybody say that the winter is the time for lost of modelling? I never have any time!

Nigel's instructions are very straight forward though the soldering can get a little fiddley (for me anyway!) and in no time at all I had a replacement motor unit ready. then the problems started and to give Nigel his due he did say that removing the worm from the old motor is a potentially worrying aspect. I broke two jewellers screwdrivers getting the worm off. I do realise they were cheap ones and I now have an excuse to get some decent ones, and my thumb will heal eventually. The good thing is that I now have an old shaft which I can use as a drift the next time!

I used the full length of shaft tube provided but as I did not have any thread lock I used super glue which worked fine to start with but after a few problems with clearance in the loco body caused the motor shaft to separate from the worm shaft. I need to go find some thread lock as I can see this happening at the start of an exhibition! on this particular loco the worm is already badly chewed so I might start looking for a replacement chassis anyway as the gears on this one are a bit crunchy. If I do through this chassis away I can reuse the re-motoring kit in another one later!

My pizza layout, Withywindle Mill, has won the competition it was built for - the GDNGRS Pizza layout competition! It was a late decision to have a competition at this years ExpoNG so we kept it to members only. On the day there were five layouts but I know of five others that were underway but not finished in time - hopefully we will see them all one day. We needed an impartial judge for the competition so we asked Carl Arendt who runs the very popular Micro/Small layouts for model railroads website who kindly agreed.

The layouts and Carl's commentary on the Pizza layouts are on the November 15th breaking news section of his website where you can see some of the images we sent to Carl for judging.

I have also added some images on my Flickr site of the Pizza layouts.

Magazine cover with Withywindle Mill as the main image.

Update

This is of course a spoof. There were quite a few enquiries about where to get the magazine - so many that I did think about creatiung it for real!

I was asked last year to exhibit Loxley Barton Falls at the 2007 Norbury & South London Transport Club's exhibition on the 10th and 11th November. I was put in a small alcove next to the gents (quite handy) but this wasn't far off the entrance so nobody missed the layout. I forget how many more families go to general shows than the more specialist narrow gauge shows and it was a bit noisy!

On the first day I had four tentative invites for other exhibitions next year only one of which I have been to before so the layout might get seen a bit more in 2008.

Both my locos with Bachman chassis decided to play dead so I ran the weekend with my new Crochat railcar and a mix of my Stenning Corris 0-4-2 Huges and the little Japanese L class loco which ran superbly! I even built up a rudimentary operating sequence over 5 - 8 minutes of running which I might make a little more complex for its next outing - if I can move some badly placed magnets!

Loxley Barton Falls features in the modelling section of Narrow Gauge World edition 53 September /October 2007 - there is a big grin on my face right now. The photos have come out much better than I dared hope and Cliff has done some close crops - so the hi resolution images were worth sending!

Apparently this has been out since mid August - I only just realised my subscription had finished earlier this year so was not aware of it being published till today...

Amberley was great fun. I shared a table with Robin Winter who was showing Wee Donegal. Behind us was Richard Glover, also from the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Society with his new small layout Sand Point and also his own Pizza Starbottom Lane so we had a good laugh as always when members are exhibiting together. Plenty to do on the Pizza before the competition and ExpoNG.

Withywindle Mill is progressing though perhaps not quite as quick as I would like as the exhibition at Amberley is next month - 6 weeks away. As you can see from the image I have built some landscape - I used a technique called FRocks which uses upholstery foam ripped up and covered in diluted filler. More on the technique can be found at Mario Rapinett's FRocks site.

Hedging is foam and rubberised horsehair. At the moment it looks very dark as I have only under coated everything - I always do this in black and build the colours up on top.

I am building a new layout and have decided to name it Withywindle Mill. We are having an internal competition within the GDNGRS this year to build a pizza layout (more on that later) but I have added extra pressure to myself as I intend to display it at the Amberley Railway Gala on the 14th and 15th of July.

My pizza layout is 500mm square with one loop of hand built track. In the middle is a watermill and a stream runs through from one side to the other. A set of sluice gates keep the stream backed up for powering the mill when required and an undershot watermill powers the mill itself. Working in such a confined space means that the scenic details must be top quality to keep the attention of viewers but it does also mean that a layout can be built fairly rapidly - we shall see!

After doing quite a bit of research I have decided that the mill will be based on a fuller mill for textile manufacture which will allow me to give it some history and texture rather than just being a water mill. I intend to power the wheel but lets see how far I get with that! It should not be difficult but I need a really slow motor and a set of gears.

Operationally it's not that exciting with one continuous circle of track and no points but it does allow engines to have a good run in while the operator is busily chatting to people - which is what exhibiting a partly about.

I will put some photos up of progress, as I did with Loxley Barton. in due course.

For more information on pizza layouts you must visit Carl Arendt's Small Layouts Scrapbook site.

Recently I purchased an unusual HOe locomotive from Japan. This stunning little locomotive has outside frames and a working couping rod and comes either as a kit or ready to run having been put together from the kit by a 70 year old craftsman in Japan. It is a HOe scale 9mm gauge. Japanese L Type industrial locomotive, HOe scale 9mm gauge at the H Back shed

Here I have the loco running on Henk Wurst’s German logging layout ’H Bach‘ and it looks right at home.

Japanese L Type industrial locomotive, HOe scale 9mm gauge outside the H Back logging plant

Currently I have no plans to run this on Loxley Barton as it is too modern, probably...

And John Jacobs had a little drive.

I spent the weekend up at the NEC with the GDNGRS exhibiting Richard Glovers Pagham Harbour. Apart from the nightmare that is getting the car into the hall to take the exhibit away on Sunday we had a great time. I really enjoy operating Pagham - it has a great sequence to follow that is really flexible. Plus the track work is so well made that you can run trains at really slow speeds. It always attracts a good crowd and has been the inspiration behind many other layouts.

The NEC was packed but there was plenty of room - Hall 1 being an enormous space that even the showpiece full size locomotive seemed a little lost. We were in a section with a lot of Dutch men and a lot of very good narrow gauge models! Overall a very good high quality show.

Hopefully we will be back there next year with a different layout.

Narrow gauge layout line up at Warley 2006 - Bryn Goch, Pagham Harbour, H Bach, Castle Rock (town module) and La Trinité sur Mer

Line up - Bryn Goch, Pagham Harbour, H Bach, Castle Rock (town module) and La Trinité sur Mer. Behind us was Chapel Pill and Somewhere in Belgium.

Well yesterday was a very long day. Terry and I spent the first hour and a half holding the doors open to the hall and greeting people. There was a continuous queue for the first 45 minutes, even with four people selling tickets and no delays in queue movement, and the hall filled up really quickly. Unlike other shows when visitors look around for an hour or two maximum, a lot of people spend all day at ExpoNG as there is a lot to see and a lot of people to talk to - so the atmosphere is very special. I did not appreciate that last year as I was exhibiting and didn't really get to spend much time visiting the other layouts and traders. 2006 though was very different as I am now a member of the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society who organise and run Expo Narrow Gauge (ExpoNG). We arrived early evening at the hall and set up the tables and did a lot of routine chores. Saturday it was still dark when we were out putting up the direction signs and we arrived just as the first exhibitors turned up. The next few hours saw moments of frantic preparations interspersed with moments of old friends meeting up.

This year each visiting layout had a nickel silver badge to take away - I did the artwork for that and got them etched - and I was very pleased with my first time etching artwork efforts (now to try a few chassis ideas!) and I had some good feedback on the design as well. We also had proper Society polo shirts with the GDNGRS badge on so that everyone could find us easily – great idea that.

Pete Wilson’s Willesden Junction won the best of show award and it is a really huge and different layout so it deserved it. It has had two outings so far and I have not touched the controls once yet! The first was in France, I was unable to go, and at ExpoNG I was too busy – the Essex boys and Pete spent all day shunting great long WW1 trains around the marshalling yard.

I did manage to spend a bit of time this year looking around the show and it cost me a small fortune in bits and bobs I never knew I might need!

Overall the day was a great success with only a few minor teething problems and there were many beaming faces to be seen. We ended the day with a slap up meal at a hotel and started planning next year’s event.

Well it's ExpoNG 2006 tomorrow which reminds me that this time last year I had taken some time off work and was busily finishing things off - a lot of things on the layout! A lot has happened in the time since winning the competition. Firstly and most importantly I was approached by the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Society to consider becoming a member and in November I attended my first meeting and I am very glad I did.

I really do feel that I am walking amongst giants at the Society meetings and I have learnt so much from the other members and it is great to be able to give a little bit back. If you live in the London area and would like to consider becoming a member drop me an email or pop over to the gdngrs.com website and fill in the contact form - any age at any level of modeling ability are welcome - just bring your passion for narrow gauge!.

So this year I won't be displaying anything - I have a railcar under construction but I have not had time to complete it for the ExpoNG Railcar Rumble competition - but I will be hard at work helping to make the show a success tonight in set up and tomorrow during the show.

I will be going round taking photographs of all the exhibits, and hopefully a few informal ones as well, for the websites and the society newsletter. If you see me please do stop me and have a chat!

I had a great time at the show. Loxley Barton was in one of the small rooms with the Loose Chipping's 4mm Standard Gauge layout and a trade-stand. We had a good regular flow of people throughout the weekend though Sunday was reasonably quite compared to Saturday. The food laid on for the exhibitors was very good - Sundays roast beef and vegetables was very welcome! The layout stuttered to a start on both days but by the end of the day was running extremely well - though I realise I still have plenty to do to get things to run as well as they should. Paula helped me out on Saturday and Richard Glover on Sunday which meant I was able to wander around the show to view and chat.

John and Jane Jacobs Nettlecoombe won the best of show as voted for by the public, no surprises there as it is always popular! I was informed that the tally of votes Loxley Barton received put it in 4th place which I have to say is very encouraging!

I might be getting an invite from the Norbury MRC for their Nov 2007 show, they took my details and that's it until then as I have no other exhibitions invites to to fulfil - and my feet are glad of it right now!

Loxley Barton is booked in for the Croydon Model Railway Society annual Exhibtion on the 7th and 8th of October - this weekend coming.

I have a few chores to attend to to ensure the layout is running well including putting on some Railzip for the first time - hopefully it will cut down the amount that I need to clean the track during the day. I also need to change some couplings and sort out one particular loco that was playing up at Amberley. There are a couple of other 009 narrow gauge layouts at the exhibition so if you are in the vacinity of Croydon this weekend please do pop by and say hello!

So there it is with the driver and curtain in the doorway you cannot see that the cab is completley full of motor! The eagle eyed will notice that I have removed the provided coupling and replaced it with a Greenwich coupling at the correct height. Apparently these kits were designed long before the Greenwich society decided on a standard coupling height.

I spent some time over the weekend getting my old SimAir compressor out of storage, been meaning to do this for quite a while, and rescuing my airbrushes from the loft. I spilt a little oil from the compressor and it absolutley reeked and I got told off. Having tested everythingto make sure it was OK I mixed up some acrylics to the shade of green I wanted for the Ruston and thinned it with cellulose thinners, dropped it into the airbrush with a pipette and spent the next hour spraying and masking out. It was great fun.

A bit of hand brushing for details and the intial wethering on the loco was followed by painting the driver. I covered the lot in clear acrylic spray varnish which is hard enough to prevent the knocks chipping the paint but it is glossy so I need to run a quick matt varnish over it but I will probably wait until I have finished the weathering.

I will get a photo up soon. The engine will be on Loxley Barton this weekend at the Croydon MRC show.

Yesterday I completed the Meridian Models MM3 kit of a Ruston Hornsby 27-32. I have not painted it yet as you can see in the photo but what a great little kit. A bit tricky in parts - soldering the roof on was tricky and getting the engine cover exactly square tested my patience! The one thing that stands out on this locomotive is the short wheelbase. It could probably go around a 10mm radius curve. The most difficult part in construction was cutting the chassis down to size and I used a cutting disk in the end.

There is a fair bit of white metal in the engine housing so I may not need to add any extra weight. I did not even contemplate putting DCC in this, not because of the diminutive size but because the Trix chassis looked to difficult to modify, though I have not actually run it yet so don't know if it even works!

I see Dave Brewer and Pete Wilson (Meridian Models) most Fridays at the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society meetings and will be asking then what the 27-32 in the name of the kit means exactly - could be year of design, horsepower, works design number or chest size of driver - I have no idea!

Loxley Barton Falls had its first (and only so far) invite to attend another exhibition during ExpoNG2005 from Gerry Cork of Amberley Working Museum, to their Railway Gala weekend June 8th and 9th 2006. So the past couple of weeks have been a complete panic as I got the layout ready!

The first thing I wanted to complete was a stand - at ExpoNG it was too low for proper viewing on the table top. I designed a box for it to stand on - there will be a separate article about this later on. The box completed I decided to turn my attention to the couplings. I had used Bemo type couplings for the ExpoNG competition as they were quick to put on althoughI wanted to use Greenwich couplings as they were meant to be much better and it was their show! After winning the Cubic Challenge and having met the members I actually joined the GDNGRS and of course I had no excuse not to use the Societies own couplings so built a enough sets to convert all the rolling stock I was planning to use at Amberley.

I also decided that I would need a handheld controller so that I could operate and talk to people at the same time. Leaving it to the last minute I rang Kent Panel Controls and ordered an minimum feedback Fine Control Exhibition standard hand held controller and the parts to build a transformer. The hand controller was built and arrived by post on Wednesday - so a big thanks to KPC for the really fast turnaround!

I had a look at the wiring under the layout and cannot understand how it actually worked at ExpoNG! So I stripped most of it out and rewired it all including a new lead and plug for the controller and then build the transformer - which was much easier that I thought it would be. However I did drop my electric jigsaw in my leg when I was putting it away and had to go to hospital for 4 stitches... Fortunately it was unplugged at the time! Te really bad news was that I lost three hours Thursday night which meant making up time the night before the exhibition! The wiring was all finished off Friday night and everything tested perfectly. The speeds I was getting on the controller were comparable to DCC tests I have done – very impressive. At least one visitor to the exhibition asked how I got such slow running without the use of the black arts…

We arrived at Amberley on Saturday morning and the weather was glorious. We had a table next to Annie Winter’s Lazy cottage; Andrew Neal’s book stall on the other side (that was expensive for me!!) and Meridian models were behind us with Dave Brewer spending most of his time with his clockwork train set!

Most of the time the layout performed perfectly but did require a really good clean every few hours because of smoke, soot and fumes from the nearby full size exhibits.

The atmosphere was great and I will be back at Amberley next year – if not with the layout then certainly as a visitor. Loxley Barton Falls at Amberley 2006

2 ton iron coal wagon kit by A Knights Work

My Easter 2006 project was a 2 ton iron coal wagon kit by A Knights Work which I purchased a couple of months ago to test my soldering skills - or lack of them. It's all brass and does not fit together particularily well (the wagon floor seemed very undersized) but after a lot of trial and error, filing an filling I was able to make a decent enough wagon out of it. I added coal and Greenwich couplings and a very rusty paint job and now just need to add some lettering and it's done. A good holidays work - though my soldering needs a lot more practice!

Just dug up an old 009 Society leaflet I picked up from Imrex 90 - 16 years ago! I had intended to join the society at the time but life got in the way as usual and I didn't sign up for another 11 years. The society is still going strong so if you have an interest in narrow gauge railway modeling please do join - and its worldwide. Current details can be found at the 009 society website www.009society.com -click on the Join the 009 Society menu item.

Meanwhile here is scan of the old 1990 leaflet.

(Please note this is for historical interest purposes only - this is not the current leaflet and is way out of date - the addresses, prices etc are all out of date, so if you would like an up to date form please visit the 009 Society website - do not use thess images to join!)

The Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society have a new website for the ExpoNG exhibition - www.expong.org.

Expo Narrow Gauge is on the 29th October this year and I certainly will be going along. Hopefully I will get a proper look at the layouts on show as I only spent a quick 20 minutes going round the hall in 2005 and didn't get a chance to really chat to anyone.

I was given the Scaloox starter pack for Christmas and I decided to have a go at building the water tower and coaling stage which was a good simple project to test out this new building form.

Scaloox is a modular building system with stonework courses that you glue together in whatever combination you wish. There are several different shapes of piece to work with and the shapes have been specially worked out to give maximum flexibility.

The Scaloox pieces are cast in moulds and quite brittle so you have to handle them gently. Advice from others suggests that they are not happy with too much moisture either and I found this out when building the tower as I had a bit of a disaster snapping one course of stone work off and then I had to cut out the remainder and start that course again. However the experience meant that I was more careful and now know the tolerances better.

I scratch built my own water tank to go on the top from plasticard.

Update

Scaloox is no longer being manufactured which is a big pity but I am sure there are good reasons for stopping production - perhaps there was no market for it.

The 2006 January edition of the Railway Modeller has a two page spread of the ExpoNG including a very good picture of Loxley Barton Falls and a small mention in the text. Available at most good newsagents.

Narrow Gauge World January and February Edition has a picture as well as a piece about the competition. I have not received my copy yet but was able to get a quick glimpse on Saturday. Available at larger newsagents.

The 009 News, magazine of the 009 Society also has a picture of Loxley Barton Falls at the ExpoNG in Swanley. This is only available to Members of the Society.

I realised this morning that the Gallery images did not contain any of the final model as it went to ExpoNG 2005 yesterday. So this morning I did a quick photo shoot.

The image above is my favourite as it really captures the dark forbidding new industrial era of the Victorian age - just the atmosphere I was trying to capture with the model. It almost has a late Dickensian feel about it.

I genuinely cannot believe this - I won! I did not think I had a chance and when I saw the other layouts I just put the competition out of my mind as the others were so good. Looks like Loxley Barton Falls struck the right chord with the judges.

I really enjoyed today especially the great camaraderie of the other Cubic Challenge layouts - Chris O'Donoghue, David Woodstock, Annie Winter and her family, Michael Campbell (last years Shoe Box winner), Fried Lagerweij (runner up) and David Calderwood (who I did not get to speak to as he was tucked away in another part of the show).

Loxley Barton Falls will be in Narrow Gauge World, a fine publication and I won a years subscription, 009 News and we have been asked to exhibit at the Amberley Gala next summer. Gosh!

Perhaps, just maybe Paula will let me build something a little bit bigger now...!

Only 8 and a half hours before the public get to see Loxley Barton Falls. It's 2am and I am not frantically getting everything ready having spent the evening finishing the layout, adding figures and finishing off the rolling stock. This is my first ever showing at an exhibition and ExpoNG is the premier narrow gauge model railway exhibition in Europe - so no pressure there then. Having seen the standard of work at last years ExpoNG competition I resigned myself months ago to the knowledge that there was no way Loxley Barton Falls could win the competition - this is the first layout I have ever made in 009 and there are soooo many mistakes! Hopefully it will be an enjoyable event. Hopefully no kids poke fingers into the layout and destroy everything (oh look a train - poke - snap. My eternal nightmare...)

Hopefully I won't get befriended by weirdos who want to tell me about how the particular variant of Walschart valve gear was not invented in the time period of the layout (sod off weirdy...).

I had better get some sleep!

Hunslet 2-6-2

Locomotive No. 07 is a Parkside Dundas kit built by me in the early 1990's. This is kit DL01 Welshpool & Llanfair Light Railway Hunslet 2-6-2 Tank Loco No.14 which was rescued from Sierra Leone. I have modelled the kit as a freelance Hunslet and this is a very good runner.

Today I filled in the waterfall and stream. I had already added the base water using a Woodland Scenics 'Realistic Water product and on top of that I added strands of Deluxe Products' Scenic Fibre glued in place for the main drop of the waterfall and where the stream runs around rocks. Once the glue holding the scenic fibre had set I heated up the Deluxe Products' Scenic Water thermoplastic water product and poured it down the waterfall and along the stream using a brush to position the flow. Once this had set I added Woodland Scenics' Water Effects to build up the white water parts of the stream and falls.

I also used these techniques to add a several flows of water from the leaking lock gates.

Southwold Sharpie

Locomotive No. 6 is partially constructed with the chassis complete and most of the body work in place. This is a Golden Arrow Productions Kit NL2 - Southwold Railway 2-4-0T / 2-4-2T. I have constructed this as a 2-4-0T running on a chopped Grafar chassis - possibly a 2-6-0.

It's a great looking locomotive and was one of the 'lost' locomotives I recently found having been in storage for many years. I am not sure if this is a runner yet - could be - but I will be checking the clearances around Loxley Barton as it may well get round the bridge curve and that would be great!

This weekend I have finished painting the lock gates. There is a base coat of black followed by dry brush burnt umber and then a light grey with a hint of burnt umber. The metal parts were picked out with a little rust detail and then the lock gates were finally super glued into place. I have not attached the hand rails for the top of the gates yet and I will either leave them off or cut them down a bit.

After I have finished adding the water into the stream I intend to add the effect of water spraying out of the gates as if they did not quite fit perfectly. I got some great shots of the way this works from a walk along the two path of the Wey navigation earlier this year.

Roco diesel

Classic Roco 060 diesel dark green with black roof. This engine was purchased in 1985 at a small model shop in Faversham. This was the first engine to test the Loxley Barton Falls track and it only just made the sharp curve. No.5 is a very reliable engine and an excellent runner.

Locomotive number 04 is a GEM Baldwin kit on a Grafar chassis.

I started to build this before I had finished Locomotive No. 03, about 1980 but it was never finished. this engine was rediscovered during a clear out in 2005 although I had known it was somewhere because many of the detailing pieces were in my bits box. This engine, like its sister No.3 will not fit on the tight curve running into Loxley Barton Falls and so will remain unfinished until another project arises.

Loxley Barton Falls is a 009 gauge railway layout built for the Cubic Challenge competition held at the 2005 ExpoNG Narrow Gauge Railway Exhibition in Swanley, Kent, UK on October 29th. The rules state that the layout must fit into an imaginary 500mm cube - no part, other than lighting and controllers, is allowed outside of this area.

The photos that follow were taken during the the development of the Loxley Barton Falls layout. Construction started in April 2005.

Baldwin Locomotive No. 03

Locomotive number 03 is a GEM Baldwin kit on a Grafar chassis. I built this in about 1980 and it runs well but the pony truck is a little troublesome over some point work. I added a copper strip over the motor to look like a firebox - needs to be a different colour.

These days the Baldwin outline look a little utilitarian to me so this will not be run often.

Ffestiniog double Fairlie

Not one to shirk a challenge I purchased this Langley kit of a Ffestiniog Double Fairlie. In the end I could not build the running gear and a friend (Michael Halliwell) put it together for me. This used to run very well but has not moved for some years. Needs a good overhaul, a repaint and some new parts.

Ffestiniog Prince.

I think this is a Gem Kit. I bought it in the Portmadoc Station of the Ffestiniog Railway in about 1976 (they don't sell any kits these days - pity). The chassis is an Arnold 040 and has not run for years. Needs some tender loving care and a rebuild.

In October 2004 I visited the EXPONG exhibition in Swanley held by the Greenwich and District Narrow Gauge Railway Society (GDNGRS). The show is purely for narrow gauge model railways of all gauges and there were some excellent layouts there, many I had not seen before. Tucked away in a separate room down the corridor from the main exhibition was the entries for a challenge that the GDNGRS has set. This was the shoe box Challenge where an operating layout had to fit inside of a shoe/boot box and very creative the entries were as well.

As I do not have enough space at home to build a full layout this seemed like an excellent challenge for 2005 so as soon as I got home I started to plot in my head what I would like to do. Several months later the GDNGRS released a statement that the 2005 competition would be slightly different. It is called the Cubic Challenge and the layout must fit into a 500mm cubic space. That's not very big but bigger than most shoe boxes!

In March 2005 I started in earnest to build a new 009 gauge entry for the Cubic Challenge Competition and I am diarising the progress here.

There were reports on the Register and Wired over a year ago suggesting that Google were thinking about taking blogs out of the search results because they were cluttering up the commercial results. No doubt they were under a great deal of pressure from commercial entities who suddenly found that they had a bucket load more competitors to race against to get a top listing - potentially costing them a lot more expenditure with Search Engine Optimisation.

Frankly if I was running a commercial site that relied so heavily on on-line search results to bring in traffic I would have been very annoyed at the way blog results have taken over the search results.

As a web user I am delighted that the playing field has been evened out and that I can find information on subjects without having a commercial edge on it. I hate having to wade through loads of results for sales when I am trying to find some information on product. It even worse when you are trying to find out some information about a place - normally you got pages full of hotels, B&Bs; and cottages.

But blogging has changed the landscape and as it has matured from simplistic 'I feel rough today' diary entries to interesting articles, eye witness writings, political analysis and heavyweight pieces so the search engine results have become more useful.

However things might be about to change again. Moveable Type and Google have got together as major blog players, Google own Blogger, with Yahoo and MSN to throw up the rel="nofollow" attribute. this is brilliant work by the industry to combat comment spam on blog sites and Moveable Type have already produced a rel-nofollow plug-in for their software.

If every one installs it it should kill comment spam off quite quickly. However at the same time it will mean that comments themselves will be reduced on all blogs because an incentive, or you could say a reward, for adding to a thread of comments has been to get a link to your site. If you take the topic further and write about it on your own blog you may well use a trackback - which will also fall foul of the nofollow rel.

This means that this whole network of links between blogs that give them such high rankings will start to crumble and the page rankings and search engine positioning will drop and the commercial sites will start to gain ground again. In some ways this is not good news for the search engines either as they may see their placed adverts revenue drop as the blog 'chaff' dissipates.

It will be interesting to see what develops over the next few months.

I have just added the MT plug in to my site and so I don't expect anyone to bother to comment here any more!

Update!

Actually what I would like in the MT Plug-in is to add the rel="nofollow" to urls in the comment but not for the commentors url. This will mean that the commenter gets credit for their contribution.

Yes this field could still get spammed but I use moderation tools such as MTBlacklist to spot and block naughty URLs.

I have got my act together at last and started shifting content to a dedicated web space. Previously it has been kept in three different locations.

If the look is familiar then you are working on a certain lizardy project - thing is this version IS css and has a cms system behind it. Please dont ask how long it took and how much it's cost. You won't like it!

Over the past few years I have become more and more engrossed with Cascading Style Sheets and the benefits they offer to the web. This year I have stepped up that interest with an eventual aim of changing all the sites that I run over to css. My mantra now is that the only time I use tables in my code is when I need to display a table of content!

This does mean that the layouts are going to get simpler and while I am at it I intend to make the sites fully accessible and make them Bobby and 508 complient. No small task.

As part of this secion of the site I will be including little snippets of real life css code that I have used, strategy for css and cms driven sites and anything else that is relevant. Links to useful css and accessabilty sites will appear in the menu.

I have seen a couple of examples of css roll over buttons on the web but they changed a simple square block of colour and I wanted something more stylish - more like what you do with graphical javascript rollovers. I decide the way to do it was to use an image as the background and change it in the style for a:hover and a:visited.

First of all I made 4 graphics. The first was a 15px square transparent gif and the other three were coloured buttons also 15px square.

I then coded a link and included the transparent_15.gif before the links text: This is a link to another page.

This is the link to the demo page

Notice I have added both a title tag for the link and an alt tag for the image to help with Accessability.

Then I added the css:

a { background-image: url(orangeround_15.gif); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 0px 3px; color: #000000; text-decoration: underline}  

a:hover { background-image: url(greenround_15.gif); background-repeat: 

no-repeat; background-position: 0px 3px; color: #000000} body { font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 12px}  

p { padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px} a:visited { background-image: url(greenroundtick_15.gif);   

background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 0px 3px; color: #000000 }

The orange button appears as the link style background and the transparent gif ensures the text is moved to the right the correct amount. When you mouse over the link the a:hover style comes into play which changes the background to the green button. When you have visited the link and come back the a:visited style shows the green button with tick as a background. You could also add images for a:active if you wished. You could do this without the transparent gif by adding 15px left padding but we can use this technique for links in the middle of a paragraph of text.

Pete, Paula's brother and I went down to Leith hill near Dorking on Sunday morning for a five mile walk. It was very misty on the way down - which made the scenery going into Coldharbour all the more dramatic.

The walk up to Leith Hill Tower was hard going for a few minutes but is do-able by all but the very unfit. We had a very welcome cup of tea, cake and fudge at the tea concession in the tower. On route we saw fantastic views of cottages, ponds with swans, waterfalls, rabbits and heard dozens of different birds. One outstanding point is the cricket pitch half way up - highest in Southern England - with the most amazing view.

The local pub - the Plough - in Coldharbour is excellent but got very packed not long after we arrived. The food looked excellent and the range of beers was very good. Recommended for anyone with a couple of spare hours (+ pub lunch).

The up side of being unwell is that I have spent this week delving into CSS. What a minefeild! I have used CSS for a longtime now but never for the page layout. The home page now uses my first public stab at it.

I still have to break the home page down into php elements so that the rest of the site can be rebuilt quickly. I may even run parts of the shared code within the CMS so that I can do remote code changes to the whole site quickly... Hmm.

And I have had a brilliant idea about style sheets and a local random varient to drive them - more later! (What?)

I just realised that there is a bug with IE5Mac. Poo. Have to work on that later - only me that looks at the site on a Mac anyway.

Just checked my hotmail account - which I only have so that I can use MSN Messenger because certain friends use it rather than ICQ.

MSN are now expiring unused hotmail accounts after 30 days. What a pain! They claim its to save disk space. Hmmm. More likley to ensure that the e-mail addresses they are selling to third parties are good ones - thereby bringing in more income. I have had loads of spam in my hotmail account and yet have never used the address anywhere...

MSN Hotmail account expiration policy

Please be sure to sign in to your MSN Hotmail account every 30 days. If you don't, your account will become inactive, and: You will lose all e-mails and attachments in your Inbox and other folders All of your incoming e-mail will be rejected You will lose all contacts in your Address Book

Unfortunately, this information cannot be recovered.* As a valued Hotmail member, we want to make sure you know that subscribing to MSN Extra Storage exempts you from this account expiration policy. It's the smartest way to prevent the loss of all the important information in your MSN Hotmail account.

Paula suprised me with a holiday in Japan for my birthday. We went on the 6th April and arrived back on the 18th and it was awesome. We are putting together a gallery of images that we took while there which will be available very soon.

Mum, dad, Conor, Lou and Steve are up for the day visiting - if you have been looking at the web cam you may have seen us! Dad is snoozing in the sun at the moment and I will have a post lunch nap myself in a moment. :)

Down in Deal for a little drink with Phil and Vicky for Phil's special old man birthday. Big hi to Steve because it's his birthday actually today!

OK Big changes to this page in July 2007! We now have a timelapse webcam picture for you.

This is achieved by loading up the last 50 images onto the server and then showing you a flash slide show of them in reverse sequence. I have used the Monoslideshow flash system to create the slide show and I can highly recommend it as the xml is easy to put together and the possible customisation is extensive - so important on the web to day to make sure every site looks different!