Simon Cox's website feed
I have had the disks from my Drobo 5N sitting in protective cases for five years. We had a power cut while it was doing something and from that point I was unable to connect to it despite everything I tried. I did get in contact with a specialist Drobo recovery business who quoted over £1k to restore the files, plus I would need to need to ship it to them and would probably need some other storage…
I have received a 009 Society Kerr Stuart Sirdar, a new 009 narrow Gauge loco produced by Rapido Trains UK. The next day I received a package with two more from elsewhere. I had pre-ordered one when they were initially announced, then the 009 Society Exclusive version was announced and then I also received one as a gift. The 009 Society locomotive is a "What If" as it has a short tank which were…
In a bout of inspiration this week I changed some of the framework on this site. It started by realising that the additional content below an article was wrapped up in the article tag. I found this when I tested SEOTesting’s new Content Evaluator tool and it suggested that there were parts of the page that were nothing to do with the main content. And it was correct - the Secondary links to other…
Spent the weekend visiting family on the East Kent Coast and decided we would pop over to St Margarets Bay as we had not been for some time. As a kid I was over here often and my dad used to run the GPO Repeater Station on the top of the hill - great views over the channel from there and there are secret tunnels underneath - I understand they once filmed an episode Dr Who in there. We walked along…
What is OKF Google Cloud's Open Knowledge Format (OKF v0.1) was released on 12 June 2026 by Google Cloud and is essentially a formalisation of something developers and SEOs have been doing informally for a while — maintaining markdown knowledge bases. If you've used llms.txt, agents.md, or Obsidian-style vaults, then the architecture should already be familiar. OKF just pins down the small set of…
When I work on a site migration I like to redirect everything I possibly can find, very much in a 'no one gets left behind' sort of way. Most migration projects don't do this, for a multitude of reasons, but years ago I was told to only redirect the top 200 pages of a site, which was about 10% of the live pages, because it was not worth the time and effort to redirect the other urls. I did…
I use Fathom Analytics for measuring my sites as it is privacy based and has a great dashboard. One of the features of the dashboards is that it has keyboard shortcuts to switch between the sites being tracked. They are 1-9 and 0. 0 actually takes you back to the overall display showing all sites - except that it actually show 12 and has pagination if you are tracking more than 12 - which I do.…
11ty templates set up In my 11ty templates I generally use the same content for the title and the h1 tags. In the frontmatter I always have a title field as the title tag is actually the only required html tag in a html document, did you know that? So it makes sense to have the title tag as a requirement in my frontmatter. With the h1 headings you can have as many a you like, technically, but I…
We are life members of the National Trust so try and get out to see as many locations in a year as possible. One of the highlights that always brings us back to make repeat visits is the Christmas decorations - different in every house each year but also different between each of the great houses and often reflect their individual histories. We wanted to visit Scotney Castle before they took down…
Here is the recipe! Ingredients Filling 275g breadcrumbs from a gluten free loaf – Shär Vitality Loaf 225g grated mature Cheddar cheese 1 large onion grated 3 tablespoons of The Coconut Collab Double Cream 3 tablespoons chopped sage 1.5 teaspoons mustard powder 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper Pastry Two 280g packs of Jus-Rol Gluten Free Ready Rolled Puff Pastry Sheets. Method With the sheet orientated…
Having enjoyed Kaj Kandler’s presentation at the 25th 11ty meetup July 2025 I wanted a modular and automated way to add json schema to my personal website so built a set of templates and some simple logic. Schema files Structure in 11ty I have created a schema directory in the includes directory and keep all the files associated with this in there. This has a main schema.njk file that is pulled…
I was having issues sorting out the redirects on Cloudflare and have learnt a few things on the way so am documenting them here – because I will forget it all whilst in the pursuit of happier things. Directory migration I made a major change to the structure of a section of my site /shorts/ has reverted back to /short-articles/ as I am testing out a possible issue with this sites current lack of…
I came across an odd bug in Apple OSX Messages and reported it to Apple a few months ago, but I am sure they have had other liquidy things to focus on at the moment. I use Messages on my Mac OSX desktop quite a bit as I find typing on the keyboard more convenient when I am working on the Mac. It is also a bit easier than the iPhone keys. I do use the occasional emoticon - mainly with family…
I track keywords and phrases for websites even though I have had a long held belief that it's partly a waste of time. But I do it all the same because I like to watch the long term trends - it can be fascinating! A long term high ranking keyword dropped The image above show the ranking position of the keyword "unable to verify account name or password hotmail" which one of the pages on this site…
This has been quite a journey and as professional Technical SEO, quite the challenge. I have been using Bing Webmaster Tools for many years, mostly as a confirmation tool when comparing issues with Google Search Console. As Bing tends to only provide 5% or less of organic search results it hasn't been that important to keep track of whats going on. Why Bing is becoming more important However with…
Why did I want a bookmarks page? A thing that has been on my ideas list for quite some time is to create a links type page from the Toots I bookmark on Mastodon. The mastodon bookmarks are really handy for items that I want to go back to, to read more or as a prompt to get me to do something. Having them actually on my website makes it more like a blogroll of old and here is my bookmarks page .…
Winchelsea Beach We have decided to get out a bit more this year and go and see places we have not been to before or for a while. I plotted a route through the Kent and East Sussex back lanes down to Winchelsea Beach, along the coast road through to Rye Harbour and into Rye itself. I had planned to stop at Mary Stanford Lifeboat Station and eat our packed lunch on the beach. When we got to…
Many years ago when I was working for a global financial services organisation I came up with a strategy which I called Marketing URLs. I developed this as a workaround for the obligatory CMS paths we were forced to use in the server set up. It was less than optimal but in those days usability had not been considered. This came to mind today because Jon Henshaw posted on Mastodon that Bitly has…
I was tagged by Bob Monsour to answer the challenge. I accepted. The challenge was started here Ava's Bear Blog Challenge Why Did You Start Blogging In The First Place? In those heady early days of the web we built sites for the fun of it - there were not that many people out there able to see our sites anyway. I read a few other peoples blogs about web design and development, so started writing…
Just read Git Commit Messages by Angie Herrera who has started organising Git Commit Messages "in a way that keeps things organized and makes future me a bit happier and less stressed" . What a great idea! I decided I am going to do the same – so I copied Angie's bullet points into a Note and then started thinking about it. Angie is a very accomplished Craft CMS developer, who I have been honoured…
Table of Contents First Building - Sennan Cove cottage Brick booking office and goods hall Stone Office with adjoining open canopy and platform Completion of the Goods Shed and Ticket Office The original plans Reinier drew included a building at the front of the layout that had track going through it. He wrote in October 1992's OO9 News "In front of the warehouse is the railway building, an engine…
I upgraded the image plugin for 11ty on a small site which had an unintended chain of issues! I noticed that the Source control had node elements in it, even though I have node_modules in my gitignore file. After some investigation and testing I realised that I must have deployed the site before adding the gitignore. Really should not have node_modules deployed to the repository even though it is…
I read a short post on Mastodon from Pierre Carrier saying that his blog had a newspaper mode - and it looks great! Pierre has his site on 11ty , as my site currently is, so I thought I would have a quick go at building a newspaper version of my content - the Simon Cox Evening News . First off I didn't want to change any of the code for my site and this would be on one page only - not a toggle…
A week ago I started having issues with my home network, a network that I had built up and improved over the years. The first step in this was when we moved to this house and BT provided us with a couple of Powerline networking sockets. This allowed us to run a simple network between the router and the BT YouView box across our mains electric circuit. Usually this happens with wifi but because…
That's odd I though - does Mousehole actually have cobbled streets? As lovely as it is with Stargazy pie , traditionally eaten on Tom Bawcock's Eve , and the last person to speak Cornish as their first language to live there, Dolly Pentreath , but I'm not sure it is known for its cobbled streets. Mousehole no longer has cobbled streets. I do know the beautiful tourist trap of Clovelly has the…
I signed up for the Modelu. Patreon plan last year and pay a small amount each month and in return I receive a zip file of five or six figures on a theme for the month. These files are the .stl files for 3D printing. The downloads are only available for a short time and I missed March and Aprils this year - completely forgot to download them! For the June release we had a pack of Sea Workers - men…
Whilst most of the Whitesands Quay layout has been planned for many years the details don't actually get sorted out until I turn my attention to them. An example is the area behind the Customs House. It is in the curved corner on the right of the layout and will not be seen that well - but that is not an excuse for me to neglect it. Using fir tree bark to model a rock face on Whitesands Quay This…
Table of Contents How to build a bin store Materials and Planning Construction Process Bin Store Under Construction – Without Roof Bin Store Under Construction – With Roof Extra Features Block of Wood to Hold Bin Lids Open Finishing Touches Painting the Bin Store Black How to build a bin store When I ordered the timber for the log store build. I decided to add a bit extra as it doesn't come pre…
We had a Nordpeis Duo 2 wood burning stove installed some years ago and it looks fab! We use it to keep warm on those days when it is a touch cold but not cold enough to turn the heating on. Of course it gives out a tonne of hygge as well so also gets lit sometimes when it isn't even that cold! The firewood logs we source locally, but sometimes have to go to a national supplier when local stock is…
More of a reminder for myself next time Image need to do this! Adding a collection tag to a post as a link There are some lovely ways to automate sets of tags with a list page. Hoever I don't think these can have additional content to make them into a proper topic hub page so I am building them out manually. For posts in my Articles and Shorts sections I have started adding tags to the modelling…
I switched all my small projects over to Fathom Analytics in 2023 for various reasons but there was one page on my site where I kept the Google Analytics code - the 404 page. I did this so that I could pull the data into a Data Studio dashboard to provide me with errant URLs being visited on my site. The above image shows a classic example of a URL that didn't exist on my site. Not sure how…
A "Hang on a minute" moment - what are those? Today I ran a crawl on my site using Sitebulb. and I was reviewing a medium issue by delving down into the source code that Sitebulb had collected. There were red dots all over the content - what were these I thought? I had my suspicions. I have come across invisible characters before A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I had come across an…
I read a couple of articles this week on cleaning up your 11ty config file, the initial one that I found from Robin Hoover and the second from Lene Saile in which Lene had added a 3rd method, adding another config file as a plugin which I then understood what I could do. Yes takes me a bit of time sometimes. I created a new folder named _11ty in my source folder and in that added new .js files for…
Set up a draft system in 11ty Now this and a few other sites I have are running on 11ty I have been meaning to add a way of marking a post as a draft while I am writing it - just in case I need to publish a short while getting an article ready. There are several complex explanations of how to do this out there including one from Remy Sharps from 2019 and the Quick Tip in the 11ty docs . I am sure…
Recently late one evening when I should have been going to sleep, I had an idea. I spent the next 30 minutes building and launching a website from scratch. OK, it's not a brilliant site but the fact I can spin a site up quickly got me thinking. Can I do this even quicker? And yes I can! The move to Eleventy I have moved a lot of my projects over to eleventy (also know as 11ty), a static site…
I have recently changed the lastmod date in my xml site map to be accurate now that Google are wanting that. Part of what Google wanted was for the page to state the update date on it. I pulled this data from the posts front matter but because I had set an 11ty filter for the sitemap the output on the page was the full UTC: Updated: 2023-04-03T00:00:00.000 The resolution was to add .toDateString()…
Google's new policy has meant changes to the xml sitemap Google have recently got a little more particular about the last modified date in your xml sitemap following their decision to drop the ability to ping updates to thier endpoint. . In the post they make mention of the lastmod element and its need to be accurate. Many content management systems just output the date of the last time the file…
Just deployed a site using the 11ty image plugin and it is working well. I did have some issues with set up - wanted the hi-res images in a separate folder outside of src and public folders and acheived that by setting an external source - would be nice if this were in the base set up: let imageSrc = `hi-res-images/${src}`; let metadata = await Image(imageSrc, { widths: [180, 343, 647, 1200], And…
In February 2023 I discovered I had an issue with crawling a site after some changes. I like to fix things to make websites work properly so often go through several itterations of the code fixing things. The same issue cropped up again in June 2023 so I thought I had better post a Short about it to remind myself rather than just moan about it on Mastodon ! When running a crawler, such as Sitebulb…
I have knocked up a 3D chassis for the Stanton Coach I am designing. I am on about v 3 of the coach bodywork at the moment and after a lot of thought around the chassis and how to create it including from kraft board, etched parts (which I may yet still do) and the 3D print option whihch on reflection seems the simplest and obvious one! This is designed for a pair of bogies to be fitted with bolts…
I have a couple of 11ty built sites that are auto deployed out to Cloudflare Pages. I normally prefer Netlify for the hosting but I do like to keep some eggs in other baskets. I updated a site yesterday and it kept failing the deploy to Cloudflare with the error stating that Node had to be at least version 14. I checked my local Node version and it was 19.3.0. So I changed my gitignore to allow…
What is INP? INP means Interaction to Next Paint and will be part of the Core Web Vitals measurements from March 2024. Will INP affect my rankings? Probably not in most cases but it could be the tipping point between your page and another page being ranked higher in the Search Engine Results Pages so it should be considered as part of the sites usability. Where can I learn more about INP? You can…
Is there a viable alternative to Google Analytics? Yes, Fathom Analytics is a more than capable alternative to Google Analytics and is from a small independent team in Canada. Like most people who build websites I have been using Google Analytics for many years. The change to GA4 this year though is significant. Having used GA4 for over a year I can attest that it is OK - difficult to understand…
Do we need a neck tag in html? The neck tag doesn't exists in html but if it did I have a use case for it. Dave Smart made a suggestion on Mastodon: <head>, <body> but no <neck>? Where do I put the <meta name="trachea" > tag. Madness. I thought about this for a while and realised that there is a use case. Sometimes scripts in a head tag can break the head. If you have an advertising tag, your…
What is myrm.club? myrm.club is a new way to display your model railway layouts so that people can find them quickly. I have created a page for each of my layouts and an overall page for Simon's Narrow Gauge Model Railway Layouts . I t is a model railway showcase so will not be updated very often and I will tend to go into more detail about builds here.
L ast week we were hit by a sudden storm. We missed the sky clouding over, it was very quick and then there was an almighty flash and instand thunder that shook the whole house. Our power went off before the thunderclap stoppped. It was a bit of a shock but the electricity came back on failry quickly and that sometimes causes issues. I checked the lightning app I have and could see a couple of…
A new model of a row of cottages The baseboard of Whitesands Quay is bigger then the original plan by Reinier Hendrickson and so I had to introduce additional features which includes a back row of buildings. This started off with a row of four cottages which I had built from a kit by Scale Model Scenery and it fitted the part well. Having recently completed the Methodist Chapel. I was more than…
T he AI revolution really began in 2022 for the common person but 2023 is the year where it really took off. Whilst everyone is trying to get the most out of ChatGPT, already on v4 Google Released its own text prompt AI yesterday called Bard and it is fast. I was able to pull in information from live URLs unlike ChatGPT which has a LLM that is at least 2 years old. I t is, however, the Ai image…
The old cottages Originally my extended layout design had two old single story cottages at the back between the shop and the boat builders. When I set out all the buildings on the plan and added some height to the back row I realised the flow of the buildings wasn't quite to my liking. In front of the old cottages is the very low workshop and the two new cottages. It all jarred a bit with me so I…
G oogle Search Console sends out automated emails for issues including the 'Page with redirect' as an issue. If that's expected behaviour – you have changed a page URL and added the redirect – then check your sitemap.xml. Hopefully that's automatically updated but GSC may have a cached version and still thinks the URL is present - hence the Error warning. To fix this resubmit the sitemap.xml in…