WELCOME - Read This First

This is my new blog. I have moved from Blogspot, Wordpress and more recently from Substack to host my own blog on Github where I have so much more control, and there’s no more pesky ads.

Please check the ‘Archive’ page (tab on the left) and scroll up and down to find the posts you haven’t read yet.

I am also in throes of writing a help file to create posts on Github. It’s incomplete, but I hope it’s helpful.

Regards,
Philip

CAVEAT - The following help file is not complete. I am building it piecemeal.

HOW TO CREATE A POST USING Github Codespace:

1. Sign in (top right).
2. Click green button: ‘< > Code’.
3. Click tab: ‘Codespaces’ (if not already selected).
4. Select an existing Codespace, or click ‘+’ icon to create a new one.
5. Wait while it builds.
6. In the terminal window at the bottom of the Codespace, type:
   bundle exec jekyll serve`
7. Wait while it builds the preview website, then click the green ‘Open in browser?’ (bottom right, usually). Use this to preview your website on-the-fly while editing, before committing.

• You will need to do 6 & 7 again if you let the Codespace close.
• You will need to do 1 to 7 again if you let Codespace be deleted.

Every post must START with the ‘front matter’, including the three dashes top and bottom. See sample below.

-–
title: “Title of the Post in Quote Marks”
description: Any description on only one line. No quote marks.
date: 2024-12-01
last_modified_at: 2025-04-21T00:00+02:00
categories: [One, Two, SeeBelow]
tags: [three, four, see below]
excerpt: Any text you want. No quote.
pin: false
toc: true
image:
    path: /assets/img/image-name.jpg
    alt: “…whatever text you want to appear under your image…”
-–
This is where your post text starts.

Every post must have the extension .md (not .txt!), e.g., 2025-01-01-New-Year.md
TIP: I insert an optional date prefix in the filename, e.g., “ccyy-mm-dd-name-of-file.md” This allows me to keep the chronological order of posts when I add a post which was written earlier.

Catalogues (I renamed mine to ‘Categories’): one word, initial capital, comma and space inside square brackets.
The first word is the main catalogue, followed by one subcatalogue only.
E.g., [Autobiographical, Adult or Child or Teenager]
[Family, Extended or Immediate]
[Fiction, Absurd or Crypto or Musings]

key words (tags):
Lower case, comma and space, multiple words between commas inside square brackets.
[any, any more, words you, like]

IMAGES:
Best is 1275 x 675 @ 72
The grey background colour varies from device to device, so just use dark grey.

SIMPLE MARDOWN:

Two spaces at the end of a line will create lf
Two ‘Enter’ at the end of a line will create cr
      to create an additional spaces
# h1 Heading
## h2 Heading
### h3 Heading
**bold**
*italic*
***bold and italic***

> blockquote

Ordered list (just use numbers):
1.
2.

Unordered list (just use hyphen):
-
-

\ backslash before a character will ‘escape’ or show code text or real text, e.g.,
\— on a new line will show three dashes not a divider line

`backtick (or backquote) before and after` will write the text as code.

Links:
[Name of link](https:knwon.url.com)