Week of Mon 23rd Jun 2025

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.

Headed up to Stinchcombe in the morning to support Kathy who was hosting a Wildflower Society meeting on the Hill today.

We started in the golf clubhouse with some coffee and had a presentation from Kathy about the grassland restoration work that’s been undertaken and the importance of collecting survey data to track how well grazing management works in the future.

We split into two groups and I led one across the course and along the ridge towards the SSSI. However, this was a group of botanists and progress was extremely slow. We did spot a few “treasured” species – ones that should be common on the grassland, but are currently shaded out by the dominant tor grass. In particular, there was a big clump of Dyer’s saw-wort in an unexpected place.

I left everyone at lunch on the side of the hill, so I could get back down for Dursley Code Club. The monday club is particularly advanced at the moment, and I witnessed a few make significant progress with their gaming projects during the session.

Been a while since I had been to a Friday session at Fromebridge with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. Only a few of us today, but the task was to start on the stock proof fence that will surround the new pond.

The vegetation around the pond which we planted back in May was looking pretty impressive, especially given the drought and the exceptionally low water levels in the pond.

By break however, we already had quite a few posts in the ground, and we finished the first section before lunch.

The day was getting hotter, but there was a cooling breeze across the reserve which made it not too bad, even though the post ramming was hard work.

When we left site around 2pm, we had completed 18 posts, so a very good start, which will be continued over the next few weeks.

The annual volunteer conference today with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust. Taking place this year at St Edward’s school in Charlton Kings, the agenda was a series of talks in the morning, some lunch and then a visit to a nearby farm in the afternoon.

We started off with a message from the CEO, who couldn’t be there, and then an interactive session on what gives us hope for wildlife in Gloucestershire, and also what additional skills volunteers can offer the trust. This was a good opportunity to interact with others attending.

We then had three excellent presentations on “Do one thing”, introduction of beavers into Gloucestershire and nature reserve monitoring. It’s good to see what else is going on in the Trust, because the rest of the year you just get caught up in the particular projects you work on.

These were followed by an excellent lunch and catching up with people before heading over to Whittingdon Lodge Farm to have a tour of the farm with Ian Boyd.

You could see evidence of the approach when comparing a soil sample in an unploughed pasture with an adjacent field in it’s second year of ley. The colour was dark black in the pasture – a sign of nutrient richness, compared to a mid brown in the herbal ley. But the purpose of the ley mix is to return nutrient back to the soil so it can carry an arable crop again in a couple of years.

In the meantime, they are mob grazed by the 100 or so head of Hereford cattle kept on the farm for beef production. These are finished entirely on grass, and the meat sold directly to customers on their website cotswoldbeef.com.

We then took a look at a species rich grassland slope which was home to grass snakes and the occasional adder. Also some stunning examples of Greater Knapweed which were in flower.

A sobering moment when Ian showed us a birdseed field which is under Countryside Stewardship (along with field margins and other parts of the site). This scheme provides public benefit but comes to an end in November, with no planned continuation. It’s a worry when you think what will happen to all these areas across the country when the payments stop.

Finally we walked to the lower part of the farm where barley was growing which is used in Belgian beer making. This had yet another way of producing the herbal ley, this time by under-seeding when the barley is planted. This has the advantage of being able to fill out immediately after the crop is harvested. Next year, it’ll be used for haylage.

It was an excellent tour and really inspiring to see how a farm can be as profitable as intensive agriculture (lower yield, but lower inputs) and points to a mixed use model for farming in the future.

Many thanks, as always, to Ellie who works tirelessly through the year to support volunteers at the trust and is the principal organiser of this annual conference.