I’m writing about a lot of things here on Talkwards.com. Because I’m interested in them all. Or because I just can’t make up my mind about what to write about. So I write about everything instead. I do not, however, blog whenever I do something so there will be very few “reading the paper on the john”-posts here… 🙂

Sections

To read all articles on Talkwards, head over to the main home page. Or you can pick articles by section:

• Creative Writing: about writing, the process of writing, the craft, the business and my projects. (About – Posts).
• Mind Fulfillment: about mindfulness, acceptance, and productivity, or how to be productive and effective, even if you think you can’t, in fact how to learn to not worry so much about what you think and look more at what you do. (About – Posts),
• Autism and ADHD: experiences, tips, and strategies — pros, cons and all the other things included in the package… (About – Posts).
• Talk: the soap box category where I pour out my beautiful soul to everyone’s tremendous enjoyment, I am sure! (Although, I did decide to forgo the poetry section… sometime around the turn of the century… :o) (About – Posts).

The History of Talkwards.com

Once upon a time (not so long ago), I had a bunch of ambition (= a bunch of blogs!) I soon realized that having lots of blogs did not make me post more, rather the opposite and my blogs echoed emptily.

Another problem was that I didn’t (know to) update my blogs. So I got hacked and started advertising for an SMS-loan company in London. As if we needed hackers to prove those companies are evil?

I decided to try to keep everything on one site and update just one blog. The upside was I got some action going on the site.

The downside; I was all over the place. Search engines did not like this and I had my tremendous 3 visits a week (or was it per month?)

Then I discovered that you can run several blogs in one installation (called WordPress Multisite). This made maintenance much easier and so I decided to run several blogs again. This was supposed to give the readers a chance to find a favorite blog without having to wade through the stuff from the other blogs.

Then my hosting company informed me my multisite blogs were eating too many resources and they got shut down, apparently resulting in a 500-error (though I’ve never seen any…)

They wanted to sell me a VPS-server (obviously… they came back a few months later claiming the exact same number of shutdowns had happened again… erm, well…)

I also looked at the traffic data for my sites and I was not at all sure all visitors were real humans, and not bots trying to spam comment or hackers trying to hack (ok, hackers are kind of human…)

So, I looked into static sites (if you’ve visited Talkwards somewhere between April and October, you’ve seen it as a static site). A static site would solve several of these problems. The load on the server would be only from serving pages (in the logs I’ve seen this amounts to 0% per month). The hackers will not be so happy because you can always try to hack the web server but you can’t really hack an HTML-page…

Static sites are a viable option. You can get commenting functionality from Disqus and Google Search “kind of” solves the search need (it also revealed how badly SEO’ed my site was).

And then…

My first choice for static site generator (Jekyll) depends on a packaging system called “npm”. You need a screwdriver in your back pocket to manage that one… and I only want to write.

My first site (talkwards.com) rocked, but when I tried to generate my second site my first and my second site wouldn’t render anymore. So, I looked into another static site generator (Hugo) and it was good but had limited templates.

Most static site generators use markdown files with a special header where you can put titles, header images, categories and so on. They all suffered severely from a simple problem: each theme used different names for different things in the header, so moving from Jekyll to Hugo meant going through all files and renaming things, and then switching theme in Hugo meant the same once again.

For about a half a year nothing but fiddling with templates and files happened.

Finally, I made a decision: I’m moving the whole enchilada to WordPress.com. One site to rule them all, one site to find them, and in the darkness bind them…

Uh… right…

What I mean is that all the sites will be moved together as sections in one wordpress.com site (this site, duh!)

I won’t have so many technical options… or problems… and that’s perfectly fine! I’ll have to come up with other excuses for not blogging, but that’s even better!

What does Talkwards stand for?

It’s a direction you can move in… like forwards, backward(s)… talkwards… 😀

Sometimes it’s also the art of guarding (warding) the right to talk… um although that translation seems to also suggest there may be a prison, asylum or a hospital involved… 😯 … Ah well…

Another meaning of Talkwards comes from backward-talking, or as it should probably be called; backing talkwards… (although my favorite backward version for Talking Backwards is Balking Tackwards … but I guess people might balk at that … hahaha)

Copyright, legal etc

The information on this site is provided as is. I have no degree whatsoever, not even in Computer Science (a half semester of thesis work shy of one though). If you do not know what you are doing when using information from this site, then you are strongly recommended NOT to use such information before having consulted a professional with the proper knowledge and insight into your situation.

If you want to mention or quote my blog (quoting size etc along the same guidelines you’d use for, e.g. a school paper, thesis or similar) just link back to the site and it’s OK. (Or, what’s commonly known as “fair use.” You don’t need my permission to “do” fair use!)

In the case of pictures or longer sections of text, “all rights reserved” is the general practice here. Please contact me with any suggestions or offers before using the material. (Note: where I come from copyright is “opt-out” not “opt-in” so the lack of a ©-sign or copyright notice is not an excuse to do anything with the material…)

Naturally, all pictures used on this site that is in the public domain or has a usage license that allows them to be used can also be used by you. I should have provided a license link and information even for material in public domain, but sometimes this type of material only has a link to the source.

If you feel that a picture you have the copyright to have been erroneously used on this site, just comment on the picture or the page where the picture is used, and if you do not add links to Viagra sites :D, your comment will not be spam filtered, and I’ll make sure I do not infringe on your rights!

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