Creating a blog - WordPress

I decided, perhaps foolishly, to think I could create a blog on WordPress. At this moment in time I’m not familiar with WordPress or its inner workings.

I’ve previously used !TechWriter to create an on-line document and FTP to update the website.

Is anyone using RISC OS to maintain a WordPress site? What tools would you recommmend? Are there any tools?

Back when I was looking at having a blog (circa 2009), I ran into two problems.

• That it would be possible to create articles on the likes of Fresco and Oregano.
• More importantly, that it would be possible to view articles on said browsers.

The latter point is important, for the fact that GitLab is essentially useless on NetSurf is a long standing issue – it’s not great to have a system that hosts the code of an operating system that isn’t usable on the most common browser of said system.

Likewise to blogs. If you are going to talk about ""vintage" clothing rescued from charity shops" or “what you had for lunch” (both apparently popular topics for blogs), then you probably won’t be that bothered.
But if you plan on writing about RISC OS, it would be prudent to ensure that it is viewable on RISC OS browsers.

It is possible (Riscository), but I do wonder how much tweaking it took.

As for me, I bought myself a “learn php in 24 hours” book, read it, then wrote my own blog system. It’s a piece of crap that I keep meaning to rewrite (better, properly) but what’s there works and I’m loathe to break it for the sake of breaking it.
On the other hand, I know every single line of code (php and html) that makes the thing work. There are no surprises, no vulnerable plugins, no cookies (which carry obligations in the EU).
It supports an automatic mobile mode, with reduced size/quality images, a button to switch to desktop mode, which has a “last 5 entries” list and a calendar, automatic redirect from /blog to the latest entry, a really basic commenting system, and a centralised “look and feel” (so the switch from green/white to EU flag blue/yellow wasn’t hard to do), and automatic image watermarks. It is a “flat file blog”, so all of the entries are separate little HTML files. There’s no SQL or anything. The whole thing is intended to be simple. Entries are written in HTML, in QuickEdit (Android) or Zap.
The editor/upload side (written in 2019) automatically scales photos from my phone, screenshots, whatever, to the standardised 680 pixel width – the point was to cut out any need to fire up the PC to upload stuff. I can now do it all directly from my phone/tablet/Pi…and, yes, under RISC OS.

Not bad for some rubbish I threw together over the course of a few weekends. ;-)

This isn’t intended as an advert. Just a suggestion that if your host supports php or the like, perhaps rolling your own might be an option too?

PS: These days I’ve dropped support for Fresco and Oregano (as well as MSIE and Safari), however all changes are tested with NetSurf. There are some extensions (try typing in the Konami code if you’re using Firefox) but if the core doesn’t work or look as expected with NetSurf, things are tweaked until it does. Not supporting RISC OS is not an option.

Had a quick look at my old blog, and it seems to work surprisingly well in NetSurf. It is a vanilla wordpress.com blog, without any fancy plugins or anything. I suspect the content management system will be completely broken, however, since it probably relies heavily on javascript.

Thank you, you’ve given me some food for thought. My initial thinking was around a RISC OS blog, maybe do some reviews, put up some tutorials. Further down the line I may try creating my own website from scratch, but I doubt it’ll be anything nearly as good as heyrick.

The RISC OS browser situation. There are, as we know, new browsers on the horizon, we keep seeing them, coming soon – kinda catch-22. I’ll see how far I get with NetSurf (, Otter, QupZilla) and a vanilla WordPress :)

Not bad for some rubbish I threw together over the course of a few weekends. ;-)

Is this rubbish available please – I think I would like to have a go for my French language site. My classmates seem unenthusiastic about my postings to the WhatsApp group, but I’d like somewhere to record my occasional observations.

My free free.fr hosting does have PHP, and I have dabbled myself, as you will be aware.

Is this rubbish available please

No. It’s very specific to how my system is set up, and isn’t exactly a click-and-publish setup.

If you have access to create an SQL database (MySQL?), you can find various blog platforms, including WordPress, that can be installed and used with nice front ends.

When I wrote the code, I had to design it around a flat file layout due to having no database; it works well but it isn’t particularly friendly to the blog writer, not much automation, and lacking features (ie the need to write HTML in Zap to then upload). I concentrated more on the results for end users, not how it was for me. Plus I was teaching myself PHP at the time, so it probably sucks. Needs a rewrite. Needs time to do such a thing. For now, it works, leave it be…

I can agree with not wanting WhatsApp. We need fewer walled gardens, not more.