Week of Mon 12th May 2025

I’ve been keeping an online diary for over two years, which is a powered by wordpress with a simple one post per day format. The built in tagging and category systems mean I can organise entries into specific collections, for example this page has all the days when I did riverfly monitoring.

I also have a yearly page view, which visually summarises the year and allows you to click through and browse entries by month and by topic.

But these views are all limited to seeing a single day on a single post. What I really wanted was a single page that would show all the entries for a single week.

So with the help of AI, I built a custom template which serves a weekly view at URLs in the form /2025-week-19 which takes all the content from that week and separates it with headings for each day. The featured image at the top is a random choice from that week’s posts.

At the bottom of the page, I provide some simple next and previous links to allow navigation between weeks.

Once these pages were built, it became a very simple matter to add some redirects for the URLs /this-week and /last-week.

I like to look back over my diary, so a weekly view is quite a comfortable format to browse. I’m very happy with how these pages turned out, and I get them “for free” in future simply by carrying on making daily posts as I do today.

RSS weekly feed

Once I had this online view, I then wanted to go a step further and have a weekly feed that people could subscribe to over RSS. So I created a custom feed that automatically publishes last week’s diary entries every Monday morning as a single feed item.

The RSS URL is:

This felt quite liberating. Suddenly I’m using RSS in a “non-standard” way to aggregate content in a dedicated feed. Almost like a weekly newsletter.

Making this more flexible

The code to do this is not all that long – essentially a few php functions and a single php template in the theme folder. It could be tidied up a bit more, for example the code to generate the RSS content and web page has duplications and inconsistencies.

However, what’s more appealing is the possibilty to create time based topic newsletters by adding in some tags to the underlying queries.

This would allow me to produce, for example, a monthly riverfly newsletter by creating a new endpoint such as /2025-jan-riverfly. And by subscribing to the RSS endpoint associated with that, I could display it on an entirely diffent website by using a newsreader plugin like Feedzy.

Went up to Crickley Hill for my first work party there with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. I hadn’t met most of the other volunteers before, so good chance also to get to know a new team.

The main task for the day was to install new dog poo bins around the site. The tricky thing was to remove the old ones first which were in poor condition, and most of them were concreted in place.

In the morning I worked with Jill on an install at the end of the lower carpark. We quickly realised that the existing pole was firmly in the ground and was in good condition. So, rather than removing it and replacing with the new pole, we decided to cut it with the hacksaw and bolt it onto the existing pole.

Once the strategy was worked out, the main effort was the sawing and the drilling. But we managed to get it all working with very little drama.

From here, it was a case of putting the new pole in, keeping it level, and slowly packing with stones and soil, while tampering into place. We well overshot the planned finish time and completed that bin at 4.30pm.

In the evening, I went to the committee meeting for the Sports Club, and gave them some advice and strategy for creating wildflower strips in an unused portion of the field. The main challenge is going to be what to do with the clippings after they’ve been raked off, as there’s no obvious place to keep them.

Another Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust first for me again today – a work party in the Stuart Fawkes grassland reserve. Vicky picked me up and we headed over to Box to meet with the rest of the team at 10am.

We walked around three fields and located only 4 specimens sadly. Let’s hope that these set seed and spread around a bit next year.

The posts were in deep. It was quite some effort with wrecking bar and spades to dig a deep enough hole around the post to pull them out. I worked with Rupert on one of the square gate posts which must have been a good 90cm deep. But the post itself was showing signs of rot, so it needed to come out. It took a good half hour and more to fully extract it from the ground.

I then set to work at an ajoining post which had snapped while being removed, but the bottom part of the post still needed to be dug out. We’ll be installing the new posts in more or less the same position, so the old debris needs to be removed.

There wasn’t really an easy way to dig this out. The ground was stony, so a combination of mattock and wrecking bar was used to slowly chip away at the stump. By the time we were ready to go at 2pm, I reckon there was still a good 20cm to go.

I made my last portfolio strategy change in 2022, when I shifted from 100% FTSE 100 to 60:40 UK:US.

At the time, I reset book values back to 0% so I can compare the relative performance of the change. This means I can see the effect of moving to the US versus carrying on as before.

At the time of writing in May 2025, the gains are +29.4% FTSE 100 and +34.7% US. So there’s clear blue water to give me confidence that the change in strategy is bedding in nicely.

As always, you can’t look at total return in isolation. RPI over that period has been +17.3%. My long term model assumes a long term, average annual real total return of +2%pa above RPI.

Three years is way too short a period to measure the progress of that assumption under the new strategy, but again, I’m happy that progress so far is giving no cause for concern.

These relative return gaps have been volatile over the period. Just after I started (a few months before the Truss budget) the figures were +4% UK/-3% US and earlier this year, they stood at +25% UK/+48% US just before the US sell offs after the Trump tariff annoucements.

I intend to let this strategy change bed in for at least another 10-15 years, before deciding whether another strategic review is required. By then I will be around 70, and my time horizon will be much shorter than today. I’ll also be looking to simplify my withdrawal strategy to suit my cash flow needs at that time.

Another very warm afternoon when I met up with Kathy at 2pm for another session of grid square surveying of the SSSI. We were joined by a couple of members of the Wildflower Society from Chipping Sodbury. Kathy is holding an event for them soon, and today was a recce and risk assessment from the organisers.

We picked a mix of areas that were mown and unmown the previous winter. They didn’t seem quite as species rich as other areas we did in the last few weeks, but still some nice specimens.

We bumped into David who was up there counting visitors for future funding applications, so we were pleased to bump up his numbers. It was pretty hot by late afternoon, so after about 6 squares, we called it a day at 4pm.

My turn this month to do the new Lister Road site with Susie. We were joined also by Alex, who is a Chemistry teacher at Rednock and will be bringing some students here as part of the curriculum next week.

Overall, the score was 10 which was very high. The only unusual thing was a very low score for gammarus – we could only count 10, whereas there would usually be 250 or so. Not really sure why this should be, but will keep an eye out for next time.

Afterwards, I headed over to the Chantry to meet Richard for tea and cake. We caught up on some ideas around community, energy and funding for community initiatives. As ever, it was a fruitful discussion, but not entirely easy to see what a concrete next step might be.