ianmjones

Always developing

Month: June 2026

  • If you’re subscribed to my RSS feed, sorry about the additional 5 old “Gleaming Wails” posts. As part of my quest to merge all my scattered posts etc back into ianmjones.com, I decided to also create Vlog category posts for videos on my YouTube channel.

    That meant a handful of YouTube posts were slotted in the RSS feed as they’re dated within the last 10 posts on my site.

    For the curious, I used the Auto YouTube Importer plugin, which seems to have worked pretty well. Sure enough, it worked more smoothly when I tested it locally than on prod, but I think a couple of runs of its scheduled task picked up the remainder.

    Fingers crossed, it’ll auto create Vlog posts for any new videos I post to YouTube.

    ianmjones
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  • Project R

    It’s 02:39 in the morning, and having watched Project Hail Mary with the family this evening (great film by the way), and a couple of episodes of Welcome to Wrexham before that, I have something stuck in my head that is preventing me from getting to sleep.

    There should be a show where Ryan Reynolds roams around in a Reliant Robin robbing items beginning with “R” from rich people whose name begins with R, such as Ryan Gosling, Rob McElhenney, Rachel McAdams, Ringo Starr, Rachel Weisz, Robbie Williams etc.

    It should be called Project R (spoken in your best pirate speak).

    Right, that’s written down, maybe I can get to sleep now.

    ianmjones
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  • After a quick little chat with Kev Quirk, in the comments on one of his posts, I’ve decided to enable comments on my site for the first time in many many years. I think it’s been 18 years!

    I’ve set comments to auto-close 2 weeks after a post is published, and as such, only this post and my post from yesterday will have comments enabled for the moment.

    When I merged all my old sites back into this one, I was struck by how many comments I’d had over time, and remembered how nice it was to be able to have that brief interaction about something specific, with some very nice people. I miss that.

    ianmjones
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  • 24 years of blogging consolidated

    I’ve had a website of some form or another since 1998, but my oldest still available site dates back to February 2002. As I write this, that’s over 24 years ago.

    I merged the content from my three archived personal sites into this current incarnation over some evenings this past week, and a chunk of time over the rainy weekend.

    This site has now swelled from 20 posts and 3 pages, to 337 posts, 10 pages, and 289 comments!

    Basically I’ve changed my mind about reinventing the site every now and then, where I’d effectively do a nuke and pave and archive the old site off to a sub-domain. I now feel that having all my old stuff together in my personal site is more valuable, and tells the story of my online presence.

    It was quite a fun exercise, pulling down archives, massaging data from various sources, even generating scripts that would call wp-cli to create posts.

    And of course, I used WP Migrate a ton during this project, not only for pushing and pulling between my local machines and my WP Engine hosted dev, staging and prod environments, but also for backups at various stages, and the occasional find and replace.

    I’ve still got a bunch of cleanup to do, I’m pretty sure a load of posts need images relinked from when I switched to using the text only Gemini protocol, and there’s many many broken links to deal with. I also want to flesh out and better organise the archive of all my projects, but I can deal with that bit by bit as time permits.

    It just feels nice to have all my stuff in one place again.

    ianmjones
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