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Notes on building WordPress themes in 2026
No comments on Notes on building WordPress themes in 2026I wanted to align the design of this blog with the design of my new personal website. As the blog runs on WordPress this required building a new WordPress theme. Whilst I do look after some WordPress websites and need to occasionally delve into the code I am not the full-time WordPress developer that I used to be. So I actually hadn’t built a WordPress theme from scratch for quite a while. The last time…
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Rediscovering “My Jam”
Doing some digital housekeeping whilst hiding from the heat this bank holiday weekend I found an old link to the social music sharing service “This is My Jam” that I had fun being signed up to between 2012 and its closure in 2015. That link now redirects to the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20210201150322/https://www.thisismyjam.com/andymstrange Having found it I thought I’d take myself back to the mid-2010s and create a playlist from the songs I’d chosen. Pleasantly surprised…
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My best music of 2025 playlist
It has become my habit that at the end of each year to put together a “best of” playlist of the music that I have been listening to, or has meant something, that year. Again I’ve used the music streaming service Spotify to pull together the playlist. So if you’d like to listen to it here is the full playlist of about three and a half hours of my best tracks of 2025. I realised…
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Stockwood Illuminated 2025
A few photos from this year’s ‘Illuminated’ light show at the Stockwood Discovery Centre.
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A new personal website
I am a fan of personal websites. I kind of think that everyone should have one – or at least everyone who is engaged with the online world should have one. It doesn’t have to be complicated. A single page with a brief introduction to who you are and some relevant links can be enough. Having a simple personal home on the Internet is also very much in the spirit of the open web. A…
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New bathroom
The big news with me so far for 2025 is the installation of a new bathroom. It has been a surprisingly speedy and straightforward process (if expensive) and I am very pleased with how it has turned out. It makes a lot of the rest of the house look a bit shabby in comparison. Anyway, this is mostly just an excuse to post some pictures:
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My best music of 2024 playlist
It has become my habit that at the end of each year to put together a “best of” playlist of the music that I have been listening to, or has meant something, that year. Again I’ve used the music streaming service Spotify to pull together the playlist. So if you’d like to listen to it here is the full playlist of about four hours of my best tracks of 2024. 2024’s playlist seems a bit…
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Luton in 50 Objects
Last week I went to see the ‘Luton in 50 Objects’ exhibition at Wardown Museum and Gallery. This exhibition is curated by journalist and writer Sarfraz Manzoor. Sarfraz’s memoir, ‘Greetings from Bury Park’, about living in Luton as a British Pakistani teen was adapted into the film ‘Blinded by the Light’. He has recently become Chancellor of the University of Bedfordshire. May 2024 was the 50th anniversary of when Sarfraz arrived in Luton and the…
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Voting in the 2024 General Election
Off to the polling station to vote in one of the more significant elections of my lifetime. Given first-past-the-post and local circumstances I am fully aware that my vote is one of the many “wasted” votes. But I have done my part in the democratic process.
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My best music of 2023 playlist
It has become my habit that at the end of each year to put together a “best of” playlist of the music that I have been listening to, or has meant something, that year. Again I’ve used the music streaming service Spotify to pull together the playlist. So if you’d like to listen to it here is the full playlist of about four hours of my best tracks of 2023. I spent a lot of…
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Dicing with values
This week I was asked to attend a “values refresher workshop” at work. The purpose of this half-day training was to review and discuss the corporate values of the organisation. It is easy to be cynical about these kind of exercises. But I found myself being surprisingly positive about it. This is partly because the process that the organisation did to develop the values was a genuinely consultative and thoughtful exercise. It was a solid…
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Christmas at Wrest Park 2023
My second visit to illuminated gardens of the season was a walk with the family around Wrest Park. Busy, with a long queue to get into the car park, but some magical moments. More photos here.
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Stockwood Illuminated 2023
This year’s Stockwood Illuminated light show is looking fabulous. More details at: https://www.culturetrust.com/whats-on/stockwood-illuminated-2023 More photos here.
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Hats Made Me
Luton has a history of being associated with hat making and the hat trade. That history, and the contemporary world of hats in fashion and the arts, is being celebrated this year in a major exhibition called Hats Made Me organised by the Culture Trust at the Stockwood Discovery Centre. I’ve been a few times to see it and it is a very exciting colourful and thought provoking exhibition. It has been a real achievement…
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A post with footnotes
Version 6.3 of WordPress introduced a much needed new feature to the WordPress editor. Footnotes! So this is a blog post making use of footnotes. How exciting is that! If you are as thrilled as I am you kind find some documentation here: the footnotes block
