Working as a computer programmer meant working on a series of “projects” to deliver some software system, or, more often, a package of enhancements to some existing system. Once you finished the project, there was often a lull while the code was released to production. In that time, you would tidy up; do various little tasks. Often your computer was set up in a particular way, you’d have piles of project-related material lying around, links on your desktop, and so forth. You would breathe. Draw breath. Catch up on sorting out stuff, readying for the next one, as yet unknown.
Now that the St Nicholas material has been completed, it’s the same feeling again here. It’s time to destress, to potter, tidy things up.
I’ve been going through the icons on my windows desktop, getting rid of shortcuts to directories on which I will no longer be working. Looking at word documents left on the desktop, and merging those with others, getting rid of this and that. And, of course, backing everything up.
One text file, with a reminder, drew my attention.
This blog has been running for a long time now. I’ve been uploading PDFs and Word documents for years and years. But there is no master list of everything that I have done.
Wouldn’t it be nice if there was?
So today I have created a new page on the blog – only visible to me, at the moment – and started to list the items.
WordPress stores all the uploads – in a directory called “uploads”, funnily enough – and part of my backup routine is to download this at intervals. So I opened up a Git Bash window and did a unix-style “find” for all the .pdf and all the .doc* files in that directory, and piped the results to a text file. There’s quite a few!
Nor will this list be complete. Before I uploaded stuff to the blog, I posted it in HTML in the Additional Fathers collection. Those files need to be rescued. It would be good to have these in .docx and .pdf as well. Then there are translations which were just blog posts, not done as downloads.
It would also be good to add the CPL, CPG etc reference to every text. And I don’t just want to link to the downloads. I want to link to the post which included them as well.
So there is quite a bit of work here. But anyway, I’ve started. I’ll work through the list of files first, and then we’ll see.
I noticed today that the WordPress theme didn’t seem to have a “next post” “previous post” link. This is important if you are looking at a post in 2014, with no idea of what came before or after! Actually I have found that the theme does have this – at the bottom of the post above the comments. But before I noticed this, I installed a plugin to add arrows! I will leave it there for now.
Likewise I have added archives by month at the bottom right. I generally know which month an upload was made in. So at least I can browse the month now, and see if I can find the post!
It’s a bit of a tedious job, but it will be useful, not least because it’s nice to see what I was doing 10 years ago, and to add a bit of extra value. I need to make sure that we have PDF and .docx for everything – in the early days I didn’t always do this.
In the aftermath of the St Nicholas project, I also feel like a bit of holiday somewhere. A week away somewhere would be nice. A change of scene. Leaving the laptop behind! It is really important to take your holidays, as I always say.
I had actually thought about a trip out to somewhere in the Near East. Unfortunately all the yelling and shouting and shooting and bombing at the moment makes that area seem less than inviting right now. Also it is many years now since I grew sick of getting an upset stomach every time I went to Egypt. So I won’t go far.
But yes, a bit of holiday and time away beckons. In the meantime, I shall catalogue the projects of yesterday.