Should we stay or should we go?

Proponents of remaining in the EU started their campaign too early.  Claims of loss of markets, rising prices, economic catastrophe, security threats, and the other predictions of disaster all have answers.

Certainly there are risks in leaving the EU (Brexit).  But there are also significant risks in remaining in the EU.  Great Britain and British business grew great by taking calculated risks.  The Euro is a disaster: a federal currency must have the right to levy taxes federally. The EU economy is floundering.  The notion of a United States of Europe flies against history and the interests of sovereign states.

The numbers on net EU immigration into Britain are horrendous, with the inevitable effects on housing, hospitals, schools, and our taxes. Pressure to remain in the EU from national leaders, overseas heads of state, European institutions, and others emphasize the importance to them of maintaining the status quo and their existing interests.

Brexit would benefit South Devon and Torbay.  Local fishing would have traditional rights returned.  Agriculture would see EU subsidies replaced by redirecting monies now paid by us all to the unaccountable Brussels bureaucracy.  Trade and industry would benefit as Britain’s economy continued to thrive.

Of course there are uncertainties in the remain/leave decision. That is the nature of decisions.  But Brexit offers better odds.

Testing a blog for Bob

As an example, here’s an extract from Bob’s blog post:

My experiences during a decade as Director of the Oxford Management Centre n the 1970s made me realize that there was an underlying contradiction in the way that the Centre was run. Oxford colleges are run by their Fellows and the Head of the House (by whatever name the Head is known – Master, Warden, Principal), reflecting the monastic traditions from which the colleges were derived.

The Management Centre, on the other hand, was run like a company, which it was. But the academic standards set for the Fellows were those of an Oxford college, as Sir Norman Chester, Warden of Nuffield College and Chairman of the Management Centre’s board of directors (its Council) was frequently at pains to point out. Power over the Centre’s strategy lay with the Chairman and that Council, not with the Centre’s Director or the Fellows. The Chairman and his Council wielded power over the finances, and the hiring and firing of academic staff.

The Council was made up of senior Oxford academics and influential businessmen, and had more members than the teaching staff. The problem was that the Chairman and the other board members, both the businessmen and the Oxford academics alike, had no experience of management education, they did not know the subject, they were unaware of the market, and ignorant of the competition: whereas the Director and Fellows, who did know, were subject to the whims of that governing body. Moreover, I came to realize that members of the Council often acted personally and politically in Council meetings, sometimes with prejudice and personal passion. This was not the analytical and rational management decision making we were teaching in the Management Centre.

Success

Hit publish, refreshed page on the iPad, and the new post was there. Pretty much immediate I’d say, so chalk this test as a success. Next test challenge – a simple slide sequence without the use of thumbnails or animated gifs …

Testing Adobe Muse

Although things may have appeared quiet on this blog for a while, I have been working behind the scenes. My latest web design experiment has been with Adobe Muse. So far this seems to be suitable for my needs, nicely intuitive and, it seems, very flexible. I have embedded a link to my wordpress blog page and uploaded the file to a test site. The current page appeared within the page format, complete with sidebar with drop-down menus and twitter link. It works on my iMac and has adapted nicely to an iPad. This test is to see how quickly this new post appears on the linked page. Wish me luck …

WordPress.org

No developments on this site today as I have been investigating the WordPress.org option.

It took a while to get right, but I have downloaded script files to allow me to run WordPress on my local machine rather than over the internet. It involves downloading something called MAMP to set up a server environment with .php, MySQL, Apache etc. The documentation was pretty clear until the final step, when the author fell into web-speak and the location for some files was ambiguous. A support search showed that I was not alone, and eventually led to more idiot-proof instructions.

The next step was to download WordPress. Once everything was in place and I had downloaded a template, it was possible to work and test locally. The theme I had chosen offered better control of some details, and a ‘pro’ version claimed to offer more, but there were still areas which appeared to be less flexible than I was hoping, with much of the structure being controlled in an inaccessible back room.

The main reason for trying the .org option was an assumption that this would give me control over the site files, and enable me to upload these to other hosts. As far as I can tell this isn’t as straightforward as I thought. It appears that Wordpress works on a database system, so individual pages don’t actually exist. The ability to manage multiple sites also appears to be less than straightforward, again by many of the actions being managed in that back room.

So, although I think this approach may work for my simple website and blog, unless clients are happy to work within the constraints of WordPress, hosted by WordPress, I think I will stick with the old page-based system.

Further developments

Further minor refinements made to the test site this morning. I have dropped in a draft, wide-frame animated gif but would prefer to have a simple image slider which the user could control. It looks like this will require the use of plug-ins which are prohibited in WordPress.com sites. Some templates (including this, Sketch) have ‘post sliders’. Having migrated from another template to Sketch the home page didn’t have this feature so I’m currently trying to figure out how to include it … not sure it will do what I want it to do anyway, but putting it to the test is the next challenge.

Updated to ‘Sketch’

OK – progress is being made. Today I updated the overall theme for this test site to ‘Sketch’.

The new site took on the new attributes and many of the niggles of yesterday were improved. However, one feature of ‘Sketch’ which attracted me was the on-page slide show on the site sample home page. As I wasn’t starting the site from scratch there wasn’t even a placeholder, and so far I haven’t figured out how to re-instate it. However, I have placed an image on a static page without the side bar, so at least the overall shape is getting there.

 

What will tomorrow bring?

Just testing

Leave a reply

This is the first thing I have added to my test WordPress site. So far I don’t seem to be able to edit all of the areas I had expected to be able to edit, but I put that down to user error.

I shall probably add several posts as the day goes by.

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