Tuesday 12 of August, 2025

Trundled over to Hay on Wye on Sunday for the Vintage Fair. A few steam engines running, but only a couple of model ones. The traders stands were a lot more bric-a-brac than than other shows, although a few I recognised from previous ones. The annoying bit was that the 4 hour round trip and cost of petrol was more than the rest of the time and expense. I'd followed the sat-nav over and one third of the distance was on the M50, but that did not compensate for the delays either side. Took two and a half hours, when the trip back via Worcester only took an hour and a half. Note to self, go with gut and ignore the 'AI' ...

Time away from the screen how ever it is taken is also a good thing to do. In the past I've walked away when getting bogged down and I have a lot of other things I can be doing, but the website services are now being wrangled under control. I'm getting a lot better understanding of just how some of this works under the hood, and have even taken a different tack on some parts to make things work just how I want. highlight was something that had disappeared from the smarty setup on bitweaver, but is something I use a lot. Searching my own content is part of why I persevere and don't just switch to some of the shelf package. That the output filters work differently with Smarty5 was one of the problems, although I think I just need to work out what has changed. However I know which blocks I need highlights in so switching the code to a modifier initially made sense. I got a little heavy handed trimming stuff and ended up messing up links, but once I separated the whole page wrapper from the content elements I was on a roll and now I have highlights just where I want them. And all is working now on the live sites. Of cause it helps that the search index IS now being updated, but I do need to do some more work on the options for AND and OR processing of multiple search terms. Making that work cross database is part of the fun so it may just be tidied for Firebird for now.

I've been trying to keep up to date with all the 'content' and these blog entries are part of that. The media server has a bit of a backlog of material that needs tidying before pushing to Plex/Jellyfin and I need to document some of that processes if only to remind ME just what tools I need to use. Processing the pictures from the shows comes into that category as well and I still forgot to tidy the metadata description from the Sony camera before pushing the Wayland bundle. I need a step by step crib sheet card sometime, ready to do the Hay on Wye pictures.