Content Consolidation

I use wordpress to both create and display content for my diary and this blog. They are hosted on two different subdomains: diary.uncountable.uk and thoughts.uncountable.uk.

It can be a pain managing two blogs, but they both have a very different purpose, identity and content. So I continue with both, as writing is more important, and time consuming than messing around with layouts.

Recently though, I’ve begun an experiment to bring together all my writing under the root domain. There is now a consolidated replica available which resides at https://uncountable.uk/.

As of June 2025, this does not have the styling, navigation or general UI I would want, but it does demonstrate a few functional features that I find very beneficial:

• Static site that rebuilds 2,500+ pages three times a day from the original wordpress sources. Build time is around one minute.
• Infinite scroll of content, and pressing any item expands and displays it in-line rather than linking to another page.
• Very fast to scroll and display any post.
• URL structure mirrors wordpress, so for example https://thoughts.uncountable.uk/non-discretionary-lifestyle-fund-multiple maps to https://uncountable.uk/thoughts/non-discretionary-lifestyle-fund-multiple. And https://diary.uncountable.uk/2025/06/2025-warden-conference maps to https://uncountable.uk/diary/2025/06/2025-warden-conference.
  
  This facilitates a potential decommission of the two wordpress front ends later, without breaking the many links I have shared in social media and other places (not to mention the cross linking between my own blog posts)
• Images with captions are now posts in their own right. This allows photo content to be displayed with much more flexibility, as the home page demonstrates – for any given day, you can see the diary entry, thoughts posts as well as individual images I’ve taken.
• New repackaging of content in different ways – the weekly archive consists of one post containing all my content from a single week, styled in a “newsletter” style format.
• Categories and tag groupings preserved from wordpress, for example the series on riverfly, the Stroud Valleys project and the People & Money interviews.

There’s still lots of work to be done before I am even in a position to decommission the wordpress front end:

• How to reconcile the styling of the diary compared to this blog
• RSS feeds
• Guestbook
• menu navigation that makes sense across both content types
• search (something I don’t expose on either site today, but could. Seems like it will be quite difficult on a static site.

I would still maintain wordpress for content management at the backend (so called headless configuration). I don’t really see any benefit in migrating to new system, especially since content augmentation is such a large part of my content rendering (more on that in a future article).

It’s been an interesting project and also aligns with my broader goals to be read in 200 years time. In order to achieve that, I need to decouple the content storage from the display technology, and doing this consolidation project goes a long towards organising everything in a better way.