Category Archives: website

“His or ours, Hank?”

Mine!

I used to use a plugin to pull post titles from other websites under the domain (all ‘sections’ are separate websites) to show in the “widgets” on the sides to get some ‘interaction’ between the different ‘sections’. That plugin had not been updated for over two years, so it is only a matter of time before something changes and it stops working.

So I looked around for an alternative and could not really find anything that made me happy. Then I noticed that WordPress itself has a new widget that has that very functionality. Great! Another plugin that I can ditch. This widget works great in the “sidebars”, but I used the abandoned plugin for the archive pages too.

So I turned off the old plugin to see what would die and believe it or not, it was that old / ‘simple’ plugin that added the hip and ‘new’ widgets that I just discovered. Argh!

So after an entire day of making something fancy with the new tools, I was back at having to look for a plugin that would do what I want. It does not really sound that strange to me. It should be able to make lists of posts of other sites and it should make a list of posts of the ‘section’ website itself for the archive pages. It seems that there is no such thing any more…

WordPress itself now has a “block” to show recent posts, even by category. That would mean that I ‘only’ had to find a plugin that is not abandoned to show the latest posts of other ‘sections’. I soon noticed that it can only list up to 100 posts. I have categories in the book reviews with 170 entries and I have film categories going up to 370!

Then I found a plugin that can make lists of posts and even group them by category. Great for the archive pages, but useless for the widgets since it can only access one site.

So this morning I started experimenting with yet another plugin. It is good in pulling posts from anywhere around, it can present hip carousels and has plenty options, but… It is not good at making archive pages with hundreds of posts…

So I ended up with replacing one old plugin with two new ones. Sigh.

But what do you think of the fancy news page?

I’ve ran a website since 2001 (Sententia) which changed names twice (Monas.nl (2002), Gangleri.nl (2007)). Quite a period, 18 years. I guess that makes me an internet dinosaur.

Currently, there are exactly 100 articles. The last one is from 10 May 2019. My longer texts can lately be found on more specific websites that I made. I do not often have a subject to write an article about here.

626 Book reviews can be found in the book reviews section. I just keep on reading. Not everything I read finds its way to Gangleri.nl, but much of it does. This does not have the speed of the next section of course.

1163 Film reviews. Watching a film is just sit and watch for two hours which goes much faster than reading a book. Many films I see are not all that interesting, so reviews are usually short.

The music reviews are almost taken over by the film reviews in number. Currently there are 1205 music reviews.

From the few new additions on the website, you can see that my focus has shifted a bit in the recent years from heathenry to Freemasonry. I still study heathenry, but more in combination. Also Traditionalism is still in my reading list, but lower. I still see a lot in that way of thinking, but as it is too restrictive for my own path, it landed lower on my list. Also there do not seem to be a whole lot of new books or initiatives in that field. However, also here a combination with Freemasonry (and that is an interesting one) pops up in the works of Fabio Venzi or that of Angel Millar. Currently I am reading a book that I am not supposed to have, so it will not find its way to these pages. It is one of the few studies of the Northern European origins of Masonic symbolism. With less priority I am also reading a Manticore Press book and an Ars Quatuor Coronatorum (transactions of the first Masonic study lodge). When time comes, you will be able to read what I think about them.

Films prove to be a ‘problem’ recently. I do not hear of many films that I want to see. There is not all that much dark and weird. Besides, my DVD rental has made it more difficult to get me ‘enough’ films, so I have opted to fall back to Netflix for film nights for which I do not have anything. Netflix does not have really good films, so watching films has become mostly ‘brainless past time’. I do still enjoy watching films, but I rarely see anything really interesting.

I no longer keep statistics. This website has never been really popular. Who reads a website with book, film or music reviews these days anyway? For myself, there is one website with reviews that I follow (Noise Receptor) and one with film reviews (Filmofiel, which is in Dutch). For the rest, I probably have the same alternatives as everybody else. Ratings on websites (IMDb for example), information in webshops and newsletters. I use my own website mostly as archive. When I want to know if I saw a film or if I have an album, I check Gangleri.nl. If there is anything that helps anyone, good.

Sincely,
Roy

While playing with Firefox I got annoyed that Ghostery finds trackers on this website. One of them is Google. I used Google Custom Search to allow visitors to find something in the entire network (there are different sites which only allow searching ‘themselves’). Looking for a replacement I found the DuckDuckGo option. No plugin needed, no results page to add and a somewhat customizable result page at DuckDuckGo.

DuckDuckGo is not my favourite search engine, but it is one of the private search engines, so I have killed another tracker.

So I have switched hosts. The new host is considerably cheaper. In the transition I have cleaned up and slightly restructured the website. During the years a lot of junk was collected in the database. That is now gone. I have replaced some content from the website. I no longer use “custom post types” within the subsites to create “blogs”, tell “stories” or present “quotes”. When I started with that, I thought “custom post types” would be integrated within WordPress, but after 10 years they still require extra work to make, maintain and especially: show them. Therefor I have moved them to another subsite (“the blogs”) so I could use standard WordPress functionality. The “the blogs” site replaces the “news” site. It just collects all types of posts that I want to keep apart from the normal posts of the sites. Not too fancy, but it saves me a few plugins and an occasional headache. “News” simply became a page. Continue reading →

In 2002 I registered the domain Monas.nl. In 2007 I started with Gangleri.nl which eventually replaced Monas.nl (with the same content). In 2017 I let go off the domain Monas.nl. I had been owner for 15 years, but had not really used the domain for 10 years. I just ended the hosting.

When you now go to Monas.nl you are no longer forwarded to Gangleri.nl, but see this:

The present owner of the domain is called Media Village. I guess they just buy domains that are put back on the market, value them, and sell them again. They own hundreds, maybe even thousands of domain names and sell them for € 169,- or twenty times that, or anything in between. My old domain they apparently rated € 989,-. Not bad when you keep in mind that many of the domains they sell are below that price.

I should have sold the domain myself, I would have been rich!

As I said the day before yesterday, a plugin notified me of the fact that I had (have) a couple of very old plugins. This was a good reminder to have look at the website, so I have spent a couple of days of removing, replacing and improving elements of the website. In some cases these are not really improvements. Continue reading →

After my post of yesterday I have changed themes. I started this website with a very simple theme, had some wishes a few years ago that required a more fancy one, but now I again opted for a relatively basic theme that has a mobile version out-of-the-box.

The website looks roughly the same as before. The text colour I let to default black. Most noticeable will be that the pages are less wide. This mostly catches the eye on a wide screen. Other than that the menu has a different colour, the fonts are different and there is more space between two lines, especially in the sidebar. I moved the little image of Gangleri from the header to a sidebar, incorporating it with the Facebook link. This proved to prevent some issues in the mobile version.

I use this plugin that tells me when a plugin is out-of-date, when there is some unknown file and apparently the latest update also added the function of telling me about plugins that have not been updated for years. I have quite a few of these…

The risk is of course that WordPress develops and the plugin does not so it stops working. Or even worse, it breaks WordPress or becomes a security leak. I have started the task of removing plugins that were not (really) necessary and trying to replace those that are. The problem is that I have not found replacements for all plugins that I use and I am very happy with the functionality of some of them…

During the proces I also discovered that some things simply stopped working, such as the sitewide search function…

So, I have been removing and replacing some functionalities and I seriously need to get myself a new theme that is mobile friendly of its own, since the mobile-version-plugin that I used also came from the stone-age.

More work to be done!

Monas.nl

Monas.nl is registered per March 20 2002. Gangleri.nl took over in May 2007. That means that in 2017 I will have been owner of the domain for 15 years, but it has been inactive for 10 years. For many years I had the idea to keep Monas.nl for possible future projects. The only such project was the short-lived Traditionalism Discussion Group. For the other years the domain has just been forwarding to Gangleri.nl. There are a few links on the internet to Monas.nl, but not many. However I still like the domain, I decided to let go of it. Why hold on to something that has been out of use for a decade? Per March 20 2017 I have discontinued the ownership. It may be interesting to see if somebody else will pick up the domain and what kind of website it will be.