website

He there reader. Yes I do still look at my ‘main website’ every now and then, but I do not always have the time and inspiration to post something here. I do not see a whole lot of films that are ‘worth reviewing’. I do listen to new music, but I think it is a bit odd to review a release that I play on Spotify rather than own it. Besides, also here I seldom run into something really good and I do not want too many of these ‘not really my taste’ reviews. Books, I actually read quite a bit, but I am ploughing through some bigger works; one is even 1500 pages, so that takes a while (I think I am at 80% now though). I also read books that I wonder if they ‘fit’ this website, even though it is fairly general.

I also maintain other websites which aim at a more specific audience or that are about a more specific subject. Of course these websites take effort too.

And, since I do not live behind my PC and my job is behind a PC too so I sometimes want to not look at a screen, things just come when I have both time and inspiration.

Yours truly.

Every few years I get an urge to change themes (sometimes I have to because it is no longer maintained). After some experimenting I usually come back to a similar lay-out with similar colors, etc. What bugged me most about the previous theme is that the post titles were always in all capitals. Now I have found a theme with a nice stack of options. Not perfect, but as of now I am quite happy with the result. You may notice some changes in the menu (ugly centered dropdowns…) and a few colors, such as the menu background color.

I wish you all a good and healthy Yule period.
All the best for 2021

“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.Read More »Welcome to the new website

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.Read More »Website development