I wrote about copperplate etching's place in book illustration in "The Book" (https://shadycharacters.co.uk/books/the-book/), published back in 2016 and now available in a beautiful paperback edition.

As such, it's lovely to see @bbecquet's etching taking shape on my timeline! https://mastodon.social/@bbecquet@pixelfed.art/115578193783587065

@glennf Glenn, same! I hope you aren't out of action for too long.

@ethicalrevolution @blag @betterworld Thanks, Sam! For me, I'm afraid the WP ship has sailed. Matt Mullenweg's shenanigans of late do not inspire confidence, and I don't find it an intuitive system with which to develop.

From experience, static site generation (via the excellent @11ty) will solve most of my WP problems, and I'm coming to the conclusion that email will solve most of the rest.

@blag @betterworld This is amazing! Thank you. I had just about come to the conclusion that I'd have to write something myself, but this gives me hope that there may be a better solution.

@adjb Thanks! I'll have a look at all those.

@autiomaa Thanks! Kind of you to say.

@blag Okay - I'll take another look, although self-hosting is out because my provider doesn't support Node.js. I'm on some ancient grandfathered plan which is absurdly cheap, so I am (perhaps overly) reluctant to shift elsewhere. Anyway, thanks again!

@shadychars Depending on your list size and budget, Ghost would offer much of what you need, including fediverse integration.

You can self host, or pay for them to host it for you:

https://ghost.org/pricing/

@blag Hi Sam - thanks for the tip! I did look at Ghost, but I was a bit concerned I'd be exchanging one big app for another. You've made me think more about what I really want, though, and I think it's something like this: the minimal possible way to get functional comments and a mailing list.

So, what are my options for comments and email subscriptions that don't cost the earth and which let me reduce rather than increase the complexity of the blog? All ideas gratefully received!

Running an email list seems to me to be the most problematic part of all this. Short of paying what feels like quite a lot of money for a commercial provider, I'm left with self-hosting.

Unfortunately, my host supports PHP only, more or less, which limits my choices: for instance, phpList looks quite powerful but its configuration and styling options are extremely deep - and by using a server-side product, I'm back to managing and backing up a PHP app and its accompanying database.

I had wondered about some sort of Fediverse integration as an alternative (for instance, publish a Fedi post for every blog post and dynamically pull responses into the front-end), but the majority of my commenters aren't familiar with the Fediverse.

I might also have to consider running a small Fedi instance to get this to work cleanly, which moves away from the idea of reducing rather than expanding my footprint.

For comments, I've played around with the idea of soliciting emails, adding them to the site, and then rebuilding to make them public. It's quite lo-fi, and less immediate than the current WP-powered comments, but it would mean that I don't need a database or anything dynamic on the back end. The site stays fast and easy to maintain.

I've been using 11ty for some side projects for a while (I like it!), and I have what amounts to a static version of shadycharacters.co.uk waiting in the wings. This part, I'm happy with.

But there are two things stopping me from switching over: I'd like to continue to offer comments and email subscriptions.

A question for any web developers reading: what's the canonical way to move off WordPress?

I've been using a self-hosted install for years now with a complex theme and a few DIY plugins, but the WordPress ecosystem feels increasingly at odds with my needs (a simple, fast website; straightforward text-based post authoring) and my expertise (I'm not a DB admin, nor do I use PHP except to manage shadycharacters.co.uk).

There’s lots of nice book history in this video of the recently refurbished Spaceship Earth ride at EPCOT Center, but I must protest that Gutenberg should not be standing in front of a stack of bound volumes—before the industrialization of printing in the 19th century, buyers largely received unbound sheets and took them to their own binder. https://youtu.be/nnt5jYvY62c?si=G5oewMFy_8R_UUjK

@overholt Now THIS is the sort of pedantry I can get behind.

Another view of ITC Zapf Dingbats in U&lc, vol. 5, no. 2, 1978. Layout probably by Herb Lubalin.

https://archive.org/details/ulc-magazine/Volume%205-2/page/36/mode/2up?q=zapf+dingbats

❣️ (Heart Exclamation) has become a go-to emoji for me. Strangely, I never stopped to think of its origin. Hermann Zapf, of course! It was among dozens of his 1978 Dingbats adopted into Unicode 1.0 in 1991. The block was even initially named after the typeface! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dingbats_(Unicode_block)

Image: detail from ITC Zapf Dingbats specimen booklet via @nicksherman https://flic.kr/p/fvHrm7

#ZapfDingbats #Emoji #Unicode #Fonts