Chasing my writing dream, catching it...and letting it go.

I blame The Sun newspaper.

My dad usually bought The Sun.

Occasional dalliances with the Mirror or (worse) the Daily Star but his main paper of choice while I was growing up was The Sun.

This was during the '80s and '90s which was very much pre-internet days.

No forums, no message-boards, no Twitter, no Facebook. If you wanted football news (and which self-respecting football mad kid didn't?), you had two choices.

1) The internet - before the internet

First was Ceefax and Teletext. (For the younger reader, these were like the internet - on your telly). Short news articles would keep you up to date with general goings on. But best of all was the page of one liner adverts for the Clubcall and Teamtalk phone-lines.

These were premium rate phone lines with pre-recorded messages, updated on a daily basis, giving “behind the scenes” info and gossip on your favourite club.

On the Teletext page they would list half a dozen clubs with a teaser headline to get people to call in and ruin their parents' phone bill.

I had no chance of getting sign off from my folks to actually phone them. So I had to make do with sitting in front of the TV, waiting on the Teletext pages to turn, to see if there was any mention of Spurs.

Something similar to the way we check our phones for transfer gossip and news these days so it definitely foreshadowed that kind of addictive behaviour. It was a simpler time.

2) The daily rags

The second source was the tabloid newspapers which, in my case, was The Sun. They had interviews, columns with big name former players and managers and, best of all, transfer gossip. What really piqued my interest in becoming a football writer was the Goals supplement in Monday's paper. The traditional round-up of match reports of all of the weekend's games.

In my younger days I would religiously read every word and keep a record of the match ratings. When Fantasy Football launched in the UK in the mid-90s I was like a moth to a flame. Football AND stats – what wonders we were provided with!

Dreaming of North London...sitting in south Belfast.

When I got to university I found myself slogging through an Accounting degree I had zero interest in pursuing once I graduated. I would buy the paper on a Monday lunchtime and sit in McDonald's over a Big Mac meal (I had a much faster metabolism then, don't judge me). There I would pore over the match reports as if I had actually been at the games.

I decided then that being a football writer must be the best job in the world. Unfortunately for me I was stuck studying accounting and getting increasingly depressed over the possible paths in front of me.

I didn't pursue journalism or writing when I graduated in 2000. Instead I:

• Was on the dole for a while.
• Played guitar in a band and dreamed of becoming Slash (forewarning: I didn't become Slash).
• Worked at the lowest rung of the Civil Service filing paperwork and leading a small mutiny against the conditions and workload expected of my grade. Yeah, we lost that too but I was bored and aimless.
• Then I got into a graduate bootcamp to fast-track into IT and actually found a career path I enjoyed.

It wasn't until 2005 that I decided to do something about becoming a football writer.

The rise of blogging and SOTG is born.

Blogging as an activity (and an occupation) was just breaking into the mainstream and I wanted in on it. I still sat and chatted (mostly) rubbish about football every day with friends and on internet forums so I figured why shouldn't I write about football?

Those hazy days sat in Mickey D's in Shaftesbury Square in Belfast reading the match reports came back to me. So I registered a domain name, read about some new blogging software called Wordpress and away I went.

StateOfTheGame.co.uk was born.

I roped in some friends to write and we got cracking. Whatever came into my head on football related topics went into the text box and was published and…crickets.

It took a while to get up and running but once we got to a few hundred readers a day it started to snowball.

I had grand visions of being a football investigative journalist (from the comfort of my bedroom in rural Northern Ireland). What people really wanted to read though was transfer gossip and shock jock-style over-the-top opinion pieces. Plus ca change.

We built up a good following over the next couple of years, peaking on the day Tevez and Mascherano signed for West Ham. I wrote an opinion piece which got to the top of Newsnow's football page and the site had 19,000 visitors that day.

While the comments were going mad I was on a building site cleaning cement and plastic protective covers off new build house windows. The rock n' roll lifestyle of the football writer.

Football is a team game

I wasn't a lone wolf by this time. I made a conscious effort to give young writers a platform to get started by guest posting and running their own regular columns. Looking back, that's one of my best memories.

Many of our old writers went on to have professional football writing careers for papers and blogs and it's a source of great pride to have helped give them even the smallest of openings to help them along the way.

My own writing “career” was ticking along nicely in terms of having a platform. But the small ad revenue the site was bringing in barely covered hosting costs and the building sites weren't great places to hang about on when it got colder.

Writing For Other Websites - And Getting Paid.

When prominent bloggers Jeremy Wright, Darren Rowse and Duncan Riley joined forces to create b5media, I paid close attention. They got VC funding for their own blog network and began hiring writers. So I applied.

I spoke to Jeremy on Skype, told him my football writing background and why I would be a good fit. He gave me a gig on one of their sites, (imaginatively titled) The Footie. My first paid football writing job, hurrah!

I kept SOTG going while I wrote for The Footie and let some of the other writers pick up the pace there. While the pay was small and revenue share-based, it did feel like validation on some level that I had shown I was a competent writer. Imposter syndrome be gone. Someone believed I knew what I was talking about!

The money situation was getting to be a concern however. I was self-employed at the time and a part-time software development job had fallen through when the company went bust. So I needed more cash coming in to pay the bills. And quickly.

Chasing the corporate dollar and joining the big leagues.

I had no intention of following the starving artist trope in real life. So I was rather excited when I saw a position for World Soccer Guide open up at one of the web's most visited websites, About.com.

For those too young to remember About.com: there were Guides on virtually every topic under the sun, from photography to martial arts to travel to foreign language. They had a massive network effect and top search rankings on nearly every keyword so it really was a prime spot to get into.

Added to that, they were owned by the New York Times Company, which gave a little CV kudos that needs no further explanation.

So I applied and jumped through some hoops. And with the industry validation of running and writing a lot for my own football site behind me, along with writing for b5media, I got the job.

Rolling that boulder up the hill.

The previous material under your chosen topic was scrubbed from existence and you started with a blank slate. Great in one way. Not so great in another.

The previous World Soccer Guide had built up to a massive crescendo after the 2006 World Cup when his traffic stats had been through the roof.

About.com gave new guides an initial grace period where they paid you a set fee per month to get you going. After that, your pay all depended on a rather complex formula based on growth over the previous year's traffic. So I was starting from a zero base and trying to get as much content written and uploaded to pad out my site. All while spinning up traffic versus numbers from the most visited site in the world during the biggest football event ever. If Sisyphus springs to mind, you'd be getting close to the task at hand.

The beginning of the end.

In the beginning I was well into it. SOTG had slowed down as I concentrated my time on About.com. But banging out the quantity of material needed across the whole football spectrum was taking it's toll. I was losing interest in the game itself and the ever-increasing banality of rich clubs fighting it out between themselves in ever decreasing numbers.

After 6 months or so the money situation caught up with me and I took a six month contract as a data analyst just to keep the lights on. Nearly twelve years later I'm still there...

Ultimately the thrill of getting a monthly pay cheque from the New York Times Company decreased while the time I had to keep on the hamster wheel of content production dropped to nearly zero. So I resigned.

SOTG got shuttered. I left b5media and that was the end of my football writing career. Disillusioned, burnt out and barely interested in even watching a game on TV. Not quite what I expected when I was a kid dreaming of it.

A phoenix from the flames.

Fast forward four years to 2011.

I'd been re-invigorated and was back in the wider football world. This time I was building a football betting prediction and analysis engine, called Sports Boffin.

I enlisted my designer brother to revamp the SOTG website and we re-launched with some new writers and some familiar old faces, ready to pick up where we left off and fight the likes of Football365 for online football supremacy.

The site looked good. The writing was sharp and it was nice to be involved again. But I quickly found out that I really hadn't got my mojo back enough to dedicate the time needed to make it a real success.

With a one year old daughter, a job and my real interest being in the predictive engine side of things, I handed the keys over to one of our main writers. Dave Fox took on the running of the site, firstly as editor, and later as owner.

"You should never go back" is one of football's most-worn old adages. I really have no excuse for thinking it would be any different for me.

Where I am with it all now.

Fast forward another five or six years to the present day.

I think the football writing bug is well and truly out of my system. The old mental images of hanging around the Spurs training ground, asking questions at the pre-game press conferences then breaking big transfer stories were a totally different path to the one I took.

I don't regret any of it for a second though.

• I started a website that people read and enjoyed. Plus it gave other people a platform to chase their own dreams.
• I got to be a part of b5media. Although that was only short-lived (for them and for me), it was a great experience to be involved in.
• And of course, I got to cash pay cheques from the New York Times Company. They trusted me enough to pay me real money as a professional football writer.

Dreams can come true. And then change.

If I'd offered that to the young guy dreaming in McDonald's in the late '90s, I think he'd have taken it. And rightly so.

It's OK for dreams to change and for us to tick things off as we do them and then move on.

There is no straight path in your life that says this is what you can or can't do. If you go one way, you don't have to stick with it forever.

I think we all need a reminder of that from time to time. It's taken some time in the corporate world to get me back into writing publicly for other people. Now I do it to share some of my experiences, as a writer, in business and in my career as a data consultant. It's became fun again and that, for me, is the most important part.

Writers write and, once again, I am writing. Maybe some day I'll even write about football again. But just like a kid kicking a ball in the park, this time it'll be purely for the love of the game.

The Boneyard Of Unfinished Projects.

Overgrown, Unloved and Populated By Shame.

We've all been there. Haven't we?

I read a fine article about never finishing anything by Scottish writer and designer James Greig. The article, in turn, prompted a very good Hacker News comment page which really brought home the impact the associated feelings of shame have wrought on so many people.

(James Greig has a very readable blog with a lot of articles chronicling his difficulties with career burnout and depression amongst other things and is well worth a read, in and of itself.)

Where did it all go wrong?

This article about never finishing anything particularly resonated with me for obvious reasons.

Like most developers/designers/writers/creatives (delete as applicable), I could fill a skip with the number of started-but-not-finished projects I've accumulated or jettisoned over the years.

• Websites without number, affiliate sites, content sites, e-commerce sites, this blog a number of times.
• Software projects like the football betting predictor (again several different iterations, none of them brought to market)
• Plans for a football management game.
• The Cosa Nostra gangster game.
• The series of data science/analytics articles.
• The countless novels, the business-style books, the book about England's one cap football wonders...

Sometimes to look at the list of never-was, it seems like I never actually bothered my arse getting to the finish line on anything. Once the first flush of excitement was off on a project then it ultimately got consigned to the project graveyard. It might have taken an hour, a day, a week, a month, 6 months but ultimately it all wound up the same.

There is a distinct sense of impending doom that the perfection anxiety brings that leads to this. What if people laugh at me? What if they tell me it's (read: I'm) no good? Mix in a healthy dose of imposter syndrome at any time and it's a lethal cocktail.

Are we being too hard on ourselves?

One of the Hacker News comments about James's article got it right though.

It's better to frame these 'failures' as being projects you haven't finished yet rather than projects you didn't finish. I know that I need to see small successes along the way and force myself to keep the momentum going. We just need to remind ourselves of that early enough on to not derail things when the going gets tough. And by tough I mean when the actual hard work of real creation begins.

There is an overriding fear of failure that I'll cover more deeply at another time but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. The 'project that never was' is no less of a failure than one poorly executed and ridiculed by peers. In fact it's more so.

Looking at the wins, not the perceived losses column

I have, of course, finished a great many projects.

I started State of the Game as a means of getting my football writing out into the world. It grew and grew, brought me into contact with a lot of interesting characters and got me the opportunity to write professionally for About.com and the New York Times Company.

I got back into e-commerce after a long time away to help grow Liz's Lockets. Writing about data has brought me into contact with a lot of really good analysts and data scientists already. We have to credit the wins, however small they may appear in the grand scheme.

Launching a very small, "inspired by Hello Dolly" Wordpress plugin may not seem like something worth shouting about. Physically chalking it up in my wins column this month made it worth writing a blog post about building my first Wordpress plugin. It builds confidence for moving on to bigger projects with more at stake.

Good things happen when we ship, even if the first version is a little rough around the edges. We all need some small wins to get us moving along the path to the bigger ones.

Finish that first draft even if you think it reads like a hot mess. It's not called the vomit draft for nothing. Get it out, start to polish it in the second draft and see how far it's come. This applies equally well to web and software projects as well as art or writing.

What changed?

I'm no spring chicken these days which is maybe why my attitude has changed so much recently. Forty approaches and while it's not old (well...), it's not young either. That old clock is always ticking.

More than that, I want something to look back on to show myself I didn't just sit and vegetate creatively through all of my "prime" years. Working the day job and building a career is great but I think we all need something more beyond that. Something you can show off without being tied into corporate NDAs for a start.

When push comes to shove, we all need to Just Fucking Ship as the inimitable Amy Hoy puts it.

I take a lot of motivation from Amy's attitude. You really should too.

I grew up in the dim and distant 1980s. Back then, it would have been absolutely unthinkable for a parent to print out hundreds of copies of every photo they took of their kids and send them out to every Tom, Dick or Harry they had a vague connection to.

For a start, it would have cost a fortune due to photo processing techniques but the cost aspect aside, it simply wouldn't have crossed anyone's minds.

Fast forward thirty years and we children of the analogue camera age are now parents ourselves. Parents with smartphones and digital cameras. Parents with Facebook accounts and Instagram. And a whole world of opportunities to show off how adorable/beautiful/funny/disgusting our progeny are has opened up for us.

The Social Media Generation.

So we blog. And we post to our Facebook walls. We tag this one and that one. Every intimate detail of our lives is shared as if anyone on the other end of the tube actually gives a shit. But maybe cousin Betty in Australia would like to see bambino with baby spag bol all over his face. Stick it up on Facebook. Or our old friend Bobby from college would laugh at the little one in an oversized football shirt. Snap. Up on Facebook it goes.

Or maybe it's all just getting a bit much with the nappies and the feeding and keeping the house together and adult relationships and families sticking their oar in and you just need a place to vent and get it off your chest. So you pick up your phone, get a good rant out with plenty of details (names not changed, you were keeping it real for all of your "friends" reading it) and hit Post. The dopamine hit of the likes and the "U OK chic?" works wonders. At least for a while.

When it comes to our personal data and online privacy, our generation has to realise that we gave it all away for nothing. All of our private thoughts and personal moments. All surrendered freely without a whisper, never mind a fight. But at least we had a choice. We're all adults. If we want to give it all away that's perfectly within our range of control. But what about those caught up in the collateral damage of the social media sharing society we've created? What about those who don't have a choice?

What I'm basically saying is:

I don't think I was the only one who gave an involuntary shudder when reading parenting blogger Christie Tate's recent account of her young daughter's realisation that her whole life was plastered all over the internet. Despite her daughter's obvious objections, Christie has refused to water down how much of their lives she shares beyond giving her a veto over which photos will accompany the articles. I foresee further problems ahead there. And the Tate's won't be the only family going through that particular storm.

My wife and I are already several years down the path of tightening up our controls over the online privacy of our two daughters. When they were young we were very much like the scenario I painted above. Sharing our own photos and anecdotes on Facebook. Giving family members free rein to take their own photos of the kids and share them to their own accounts. But we hit a stage where we no longer felt comfortable doing so.

We are very private people.

This may sound strange coming from someone currently writing an article about issues in his private life but I don't go around spilling my guts about every little episode that happens in my life. I decided some years ago to delete my Facebook account and remove as much of the old content I had built up from view. My Bluesky feed is more made up of retweeted jokes and memes than anything else apart from the occasional football related exhortation.

Why then should we feel it's ok to cross that boundary with respect to our children? Ours are still very young but the years go by at an astounding pace and it won't be too long before they are in the same position of getting their own laptop like Christie Tate's daughter. How mortifying must it be to see every aspect of your own life (complete with visual imagery) staring back at you when you do the inevitable ego search for your own name on Google? Being a child and teenager is hard enough without all of your peers having access to intimate details of every time you peed or pooped yourself when you were three.

Beyond the embarrassment factor, we have to take into account the very real subject of online safety and child protection. Our generation (and that of our silver surfer parents and grandparents) have a real nerve when it comes to lecturing kids about maintaining their own safety while online. We're the mugs who plaster photos of them all over the place along with school and playdate check-ins. We're the clowns who check our location into Facebook for the whole world to see when we are at the airport heading away on holidays. And we think we can lecture kids on playing safe anywhere? Please!

The law intervenes.

It might take laws such as COPPA in the United States and GDPR-K in Europe to finally put the last nail in the coffin of our wilful plundering of our children's online privacy. But there are already signs from their own online activities that the new wave of tech savvy and online literate kids are already way ahead of us in protecting themselves. If they are used to protecting their online lives, data and privacy from a young age, why would they change that when they get older? And where does that leave the financial plans of the big tech companies that have made billions from harvesting the personal data of my own generation?

I don't think it's too much to ask of us and other family members to respect the futures of our children. Getting some attention and Likes on Facebook for your adorable grandchildren might seem perfectly innocuous. But when Facebook's privacy policies are so opaque that we don't know who is ultimately able to see and track those pictures, why would we ever take the chance?

Our kids will hopefully learn from our mistakes as they grow older.

They shouldn't have their drunken 18 year old summer holiday snaps get brought out at a job interview just because they foolishly allowed their friends to post them on social media years before. And the best we can do is make sure that they get time to learn the dangers and pitfalls of operating online for themselves. Maybe we can even learn something about that ourselves. Better late than never.

Where it began.

Language wars and chasing shiny new frameworks have been a hallmark of the web development world for as along as I can remember. My first website was hand-coded in HTML in Notepad. We're talking late 2001/early 2002 here.

I opened up Internet Explorer and there it was in all it's glory. It was a simpler time.

I jumped over first to Microsoft Frontpage (clunky and horrible) and then Macromedia Dreamweaver which was a LOT smoother to use. And somewhere along the line I stopped hand coding HTML.

By the time I started my first blog in 2005 there was a new kid on the block that everyone seemed to be talking about - Wordpress. It's hard to believe now but back then there was still a lot of scepticism about Matt's ability to really make a dent in the CMS world. Especially at a time when PHP was already starting to draw it's fair share of criticism from the developer community. Looking back now as around a third of all websites run on Wordpress, you have to say Matt knew what he was doing!

Over the intervening years I put a lot of time into building websites with Wordpress. Woocommerce shops. Affiliate stores with product pages populated from Amazon's API (amongst others). Salon booking systems. Membership sites. Personal blogs (mainly this one) over and over and over. Grand opening, grand closing. When I wanted to build a website I installed Wordpress. Me and most of the rest of the world as the number of WP installs shows.

Back in the saddle again.

Early last year I started blogging and writing again more seriously than I had done in the best part of ten years. I'd been busy building a corporate data science career. And a family. Not necessarily in that order but certainly concurrently. I wanted to write and share some of what I'd learned during that period. Being involved in businesses, large and small, and finding the sweet spot where tech and data started to make real business improvements, I thought I had something worth writing about.

So I created SimpleAnalytical for my data science writing and AlanHylands.com for all of my other many varied writing interests. Wordpress for one. Wordpress for the other. And for a while it worked well. Like a comfortable old pair of trousers, my old friend had stretched a little but was still just about recognisable enough for me to jump back in with a vengeance.

Where did it start to go wrong?

Wordpress is well stocked with a world of plug-ins for any and every eventuality a site developer might need. The same goes for themes as the web creaks under the weight of so many Wordpress free and premium theme offerings. My tastes are rather simple as you can tell. Even so, in a serious case of yak shaving I managed to rack up just under 200 versions of the home page design for AlanHylands.com. Yes, 200. And in the end the last version I had as a bastardised version of the Generatepress theme was this:

200 versions and I got a plain white homepage with a picture and a little text. Job well done. Ahem.

The site was still slow however. I didn't use a lot of fancy wizardry but the number of plug-ins still seemed to mount up. Google's Page Speed Insights app didn't like it at all. It ran like a dog. And seeing as all I was doing was writing an occasional article with a lot of text and a few images I got to thinking - why do I need all of these plug-ins and a database at all?

I've been getting well into the community at the excellent Dev.to and I started reading more and more about static site generators. Hugo, Jekyll, Gatsby. The names kept coming and I was intrigued. I hadn't written any Javascript in a LONG time so the thought of having to learn all of that to even get started was enough to put me off.

I needn't have worried.

This weekend I bit the bullet and decided to give Gatsby a go. I'd been reading great things about Netlify as a host and with a little over a dozen blog posts to convert to Markdown I figured I'd convert AH.com and see how I got on. Worst case scenario it would be a few hours wasted but if it turned out well...

Standing on the shoulders of giants.

React developer Dave Ceddia has an excellent beginner's guide to starting a blog with Gatsby and Netlify which was perfect for what I needed. Getting my hands dirty with the terminal, Node, Javascript and Github was a great introduction to this whole world of frontend development that has happened while my gaze was somewhere a little more data-sciencey.

Dave walks you through installing a Gatsby starter to get up and running quickly. Once I'd poked around at it and made a few changes I got my confidence up and started moving the blog post list to another page and re-creating the look of my previous Wordpress homepage in Gatsby.

New posts are written in Markdown and are essentially text files so it's incredibly lightweight and there is no need for a database. There is no admin section or scripts to hack so it's more secure that way as well. Everyone who has ever ran a Wordpress website knows how easy it is to drop the security ball. Especially when we start adding more and more plug-ins to get added functionality. SSGs don't have quite the same issues which is a great bonus. They are also lightning fast which readers LOVE (and so does Google). Double bubble.

Dave's tutorial walks you through pushing your new blog to a Github repo and then deploying it to Netlify. It takes a matter of minutes and it's live. Boom. Job done. Well, not quite.

A minor fly in the ointment.

Things are never quite as stress-free as we would like when we aren't working from a green field site. For me the main issue was the email address I use for quite a few log-ins and communications. Netlify doesn't do email hosting so I had to scramble around and piece together a solution from around 20 open Chrome tabs and searches.

I'm still testing it out just to make sure it's worked ok but I think I've found a workable solution. My old reseller hosting package uses WHM and cPanel. Using my existing account on there I was able to add A and MX records at Netlify DNS to re-direct any email back to the email host on my old account.

There I can set up email forwarders and use their SMTP for sending under an alias through my personal Gmail. If it looks like being a success longer term I'll write that up as it was a bit of a sweat to work out.

What's next?

I've still got several updates to this site that I'd like to do so it'lll remain a work in progress. It's clean. It's fast. It's something new for me to play with and a good base to explore more about Gatsby. But I don't have a navigation bar at the top and I think I'll add that next. Anything to avoid doing any proper work!

What I really have to think about now is whether I want to migrate my data blog Simple Analytical over to Gatsby with a lot more posts, code blocks, tables and Mailchimp integrations. Watch out for Part 2 when I get that conundrum worked out.

So am I done with Wordpress now?

Simple answer is no. Like all tech options, it will come down to horses for courses. For a clean, simple blog I like the thought of just writing up a Markdown file, uploading it and seeing it live. For sites and online apps that could be doing with the full Wordpress admin backend and database, I'll still look to it for the foreseeable future.

Life does not have to be a case of EITHER/OR, sometimes it's good to keep a few options in your toolbox. I've made a career out of being a Data MacGyver, no reason to change that when it comes to the end of nearly my second decade building websites as well.

I wrote in Part One about finally biting the bullet and giving Gatsby a go. Having dipped my toe in it's delectable waters I knew full well that it was only a matter of time before I went deeper down the rabbit hole.

So I spent a couple of weeks converting my main data and analytics site Simple Analytical to Gatsby from Wordpress. Yes, there is an element of yak shaving in there.

Falling out of love with Wordpress.

Wordpress is a fine CMS and so it should be - around 30% of the entire internet runs on it. That doesn't mean that it's without fault and the longer I used it for that site, the more it started to irk me.

To be fair, not all of these were the fault of the Wordpress eco-system, in fact, probably few of them were. But anyone who has done anything with Wordpress over the past five years will tell you how it's virtually unrecognisable from the chippy young go-getter it was back in it's early days.

I had a few major issues:

1) SECURITY.

My reseller hosting package kept falling over due to mod_security rules getting flagged. Not sure whether it's fair to strictly blame WP for this. When a long established hosting company tells you that they'll have to switch the security rules off altogether or you won't be able to edit any of your existing posts then you know something is amiss with your software.

Wordpress is notorious for it's inability to maintain adequate security levels at the best of times. Any Wordpress admin who says they haven't ever been hacked just hasn't been in the game long enough. It's almost an inevitability and a rite of passage.

I was updating plug-ins EVERY day. And I mean EVERY day. It's great that the developers were patching things quickly and regularly but when it turns into a tedious daily job monitoring and making sure the updates happen, it's time to re-evaluate your approach.

When, as I said above, the host tells you that the only eay to let you edit posts is to switch more security off, it sends alarm bells ringing. LOUD ONES.

2) SO MANY PLUG-INS.

The great thing about the Wordpress eco-system is the sheer number of plug-ins. One of the worst things about the Wordpress eco-system is the sheer number of plug-ins. By the time I'd had enough with the daily updates, I was running 18 different plug-ins on my WP install for Simple Analytical.

No-one made me use them all but I'll swear blind that none of them were extraneous. When you get to the point where you have to install yet another plug-in to shut down the use of the new Gutenberg editor that you didn't want in the first place, it's time to re-evaluate your choices in life. You'll notice I was getting to the re-evaluation point quite a lot here.

3) SPEED OR LACK THEREOF.

Tomorrow we will run faster.

The main reason behind me moving my data blog Simple Analytical to Gatsby can be summed up in the quote above. Simply put, building my blog site with Gatsby and hosting on Netlify lets it go like the proverbial shit off a shovel. For the non-Northern Irish amongst you, that means it's rather quick. Like greased lightning kind of quick. Usain Bolt quick.

Testing on localhost is never a fair representation of what it will be like in the wild but even there it was looking DAMN good. Getting it going on Github and Netlify didn't lose any of that speed and I couldn't be happier.

Simple Analytical is a blog. It's a collection of articles giving my perspective on issues, trials and tribulations data analysts find at all stages of their data careers. It's text and a few images on the screen. That's it. It doesn't need a full database and CMS behind it. Gatsby let me get back to that and I'm very grateful.

So how did I approach the migration?

I'd learnt a lot from my first foray into the world of Gatsby (note: you're reading it now). One major difference with porting over my analytics blog was that people actually read it...

I wanted a few things that I didn't have with this particular starter:

• a top navigation bar.
• categories to split up the main types of content (e.g. Articles / Interviews)
• tags for further classification with the articles or types of interviews.
• Mailchimp form integration.

Where to begin the search?

I didn't want to code the whole site from scratch. My React and Gatsby powers aren't quite there just yet. But I did want something I could hit the ground running with and lose none of my existing content.

After a lot of trial and error with different starter sites from the excellent Gatsby Starter Library I still wasn't getting what I wanted. I turned instead to the Gatsby Showcase to see how some of the top Gatsby sites on the web had been put together. The Showcase has over 500 Gatsby sites on display, many of which have made their source code available on Github.

A little help from a kind stranger.

The manu.ninja site caught my eye. It's the personal blog of front-end developer Manuel Wieser and had all of the basics nailed for what I wanted for Simple Analytical. Clean, straightforward design and layout. Blog. Top nav bar. Provision for other content pages, tags and categories.

So I downloaded Manu's source code from Github and got to work. After a lot of tinkering, hacking, slicing, dicing and creating, I had whipped Manu's original into something a little more my own. Couldn't have done it without all of the original hard work being made available for use on Github though which is an amazing act of generosity to help further the community and learning of other developers. Thank you Manu Wieser!

Old world meets new world.

Porting over my own content from the Wordpress site was a time-sink but a necessary evil. Peter Akkies had written an excellent blog post on exporting your Wordpress posts to Gatsby markdown which pointed me in the direction of the Wordpress-to-Hugo exporter plug-in.

This plug-in saved a lot of copy-pasta and hand converting and maintained frontmatter as well. I did still have to manually review all of the posts (circa 60 posts and pages) and manually correct any markdown that didn't translate properly. Peter does warn in his article about having to fix slugs and some frontmatter to fit the Gatsby blog and GraphQL so it wasn't a surprise. If I'd had hundreds of blog posts to convert it might have been a different story. As it was I did a little scripting to speed up some naming changes etc. as I tried a few different starter set-ups so having some Python or other scripting language up your sleeve is useful.

You've Got Mail(chimp).

The biggest addition to the manu.ninja code I had to bring in was Mailchimp form integration. I went for the gatsby-plugin-mailchimp plug-in and configured a general email sign-up form to include after all posts on the Simple Analytical site.

I will have to re-visit this in time as it only sets people up to be added to the generic newsletter mailing list. If/when I add specific content upgrades and mini courses back into the site I'll have to find a way to include those tags back into Mailchimp. There is always more dev to be done.

Any other issues?

I mentioned in Wordpress->Gatsby part 1 that I'd had to do an email workaround and I've done the same thing on this site migration. Netlify DNS is very easy to configure so adding A and MX records to point to the mailserver at my other hosting provider was pretty simple.

Otherwise, the migration was quick. The site is VERY fast on pageload and Google's Pagespeed Insights tool LOVES it.

I'll report back in future if any major problems show up but for now I'm more than happy to have made the switch. I'm not finished with Wordpress. In fact I've spent a good part of the week putting a booking system together for a client using Wordpress and the excellent Amelia plug-in.

I'm not planning on becoming a full-time front-end dev either but it's been an interesting sojourn into this world. Javascript and web apps have came on a long way from my early days using it. But the support and guidance from so many devs in the community through blog posts, articles and forum answers has been a big help into getting up and running quickly. I'm looking forward to building on the basis of these two sites I've migrated over to Gatsby. And who knows, I might even get around to writing more articles for them along the way!

I still haven't forgiven Roy Carroll for saying it didn't cross the line. There was a minute to go at Old Trafford on a cold January night in 2005. United were in transition and Spurs in the midst of yet another ultimately unfruitful five year plan, this time with cuddly Gandolfini look-a-like “Uncle” Martin Jol at the helm.

Pedro Mendes hit one from just inside the United half and it looped high and slow towards Roy Carroll in the United goal. Roy, inexplicably, took his eye off it and managed to throw it back over his shoulder into his own goal. The ball bounced once about a yard over the line, Roy clawed it back out and the assistant didn't give it. Play went on, Spurs were furious, Fergie was relieved and it ended 0-0.

If ever an incident summed up the real meaning of that god awful top bantz phrase “Spursy”, this was it.

Technology is the answer to all of our pains.

In a fit of petulance I refused to applaud Roy Carroll whenever I went to see him play for Northern Ireland after this. And I demanded more technology be used to ensure a travesty of justice such as this was never carried out (against Tottenham) on a Premier League football pitch ever again.

And why not? I've worked with technology for my whole career, building software and data models. I know how powerful it can be. So who wouldn't want the officials to get all the help they can to make sure the right decisions are made? How naive I was.

Goal-line technology wasn't introduced to the English Premier League until eight years after the Mendes incident. Pedro Mendes' Spurs career never recovered and a year later he took his shiny locks and silky passing skills to Portsmouth. His next brush with English football notoriety came in August 2006 when Ben Thatcher almost elbowed his head clean off his shoulders in a game against Manchester City.

A seizure in the ambulance on the way to hospital and a subsequent eight game ban for Thatcher were hardly the additional lasting memories he'd have wanted from his English football career.

The rise of VAR.

Goal-line technology became the thin end of the wedge when FIFA started to pilot VAR. Already a firm fixture in other top level sports like Rugby Union, tennis and cricket, the Video Assistant Referee system was supposed to remove all doubt about controversial decisions that real-life refs may have missed. It hasn't quite worked out that way though.

VAR's introduction in the 2018 World Cup in Russia led to widespread condemnation of it's ability to suck the life and spontaneity right out of every game. It used to be bad enough having to temper your goal celebrations to look across at the nearest linesman for a flag but now it means a complete standstill as we wait for the ref to signal if he's went to VAR for a decision as well.

VAR is meant to rule only on the most disputed of calls like goals, penalties, cases of mistaken identity and potential red card incidents. Coupled with the horrendous new reading of the handball rule, it's led to many a quarrel in last season's Champions League and the new Premier League season, already only a couple of games old.

Johnny Nic hits the nail on the head. As usual.

Football365's John Nicholson explains the major cause of dispute between the two camps of VAR lovers and VAR haters. Some of us like our football a little rough around the edges. We accept that the odd offside might go against us. We let it go when a Mendes happens against us because we know, over a lifetime, we'll have our keeper sneak one back from just over the line ourselves.

You can't sanitise the whole thing to make it 100% “correct” (as if that were possible in the first place) and still have the raw gut-bursting emotion that keeps us coming back year after year, disappointment after disappointment. I may have lost my shit back in 2005 when Roy Carroll got United out of jail but if I'd known this was what would be coming down the line to “fix” such future problems, I would have thought twice. It's just not football Geoff.

The VAR-lovers will point to things being technically correct as the ultimate end point and how this has to mean we sacrifice a little of the rawness as we move towards a utopia of perfect refereeing decisions. I don't agree but, as John says in his article, neither side is going to change the other's mind by shouting on Talksport phone-ins or arguing on message-boards.

It's just another example of polarised intransigent sides of a debate in modern British society with no grey areas, only black and white with no room for discussion in the middle. At least with VAR it won't lead to any disruption in the distribution of food or shortages in vital medicines so we can look to the positives there.

I should be a fickle football fan of VAR.

I should point out that, as a Spurs fan, I have been very well rewarded by VAR. Raheem Sterling's disallowed goal in last season's Champions League meant I could reverse my sweary stomp out of the living room and apologise to my crying children, safe in the knowledge that Tottenham would live to fight another day. And it was worth it all to see Pep's face when it was disallowed.

Same again this week when Jesus's late winner was wiped out by VAR for something that wouldn't (and probably shouldn't) have ever been seen by a human official in the history of the game.

But I still hate the momentary hesitation I've had to become accustomed to after a goal now while I look to the officials for any sign of it being called back. Like Johnny Nic, I prefer my football to be a bit more Hendrix duffing some notes on the Star Spangled Banner live at Woodstock. Taking it into the studio and re-touching the blemishes doesn't improve that. It lessens what I'm listening to.

Where does it all lead to eventually?

We get enough in-depth debate from the likes of Neville and Carragher in a TV studio, poring over slow motion replays of every incident from every conceivable angle. Once the whistle goes for kick-off, can we not just leave the game alone and let the officials do their best, however that may turn out? Otherwise, we'll reduce it over time to nothing more than a perfectly synchronised computer simulation and no-one wants to watch that.

Dull. Lifeless. Emotion-less.

With all big decisions made by some knob watching a TV screen. If I wanted that level of "entertainment" I'd start watching the cricket...

“We will try to give everything to make you proud of this football club.” - Mauricio Pochettino at his first Spurs press conference.

Yeah right mate. Might as well be waving a tube ticket around. Here we go again.

Or so I thought.

It's safe to say I didn't want Mauricio Pochettino when Spurs first announced him as new head coach. I thought we'd missed a trick in not getting Frank De Boer instead.

Which shows exactly how much I know after so many years of watching and writing about football.

The next few years made me eat my words in shovel-fuls.

Whether by design or serendipitous accident, it all clicked. The young, hungry squad responded to the new ideas and the punishing training schedule. They got fitter, stronger and more able to compete at the top table.

Watching Poch's young guns hunt down, pressure, harry and over-run teams was an absolute joy to behold. Even more so after the let-down of AVB's non-revolution and the darkest days of the unmentionable in the gilet. Poch built a Spurs team in the old traditions. Attacking, exciting football with a fighting team spirit and smiles on faces.

What Changed?

That's what we've missed most of all over the past year or so. The smiles on faces, on the pitch and in the stands. Well, smiles and points on the board. We've missed plenty of those as well and, ultimately, that's what finished the Poch project off.

No wins away in the league from January 2019 is a pitiful record. That's relegation standard, never mind title contention or even top four. And the performances have shown no sign of being able to change that.

The players don't run any more, they saunter. They don't hassle or pressure the opposition. Some of them seem unable to trap or kick a ball in the intended direction. Where has the free flowing football and joie de vivre gone?

Harry Kane in a Spurs shirt is a shadow of what he was even 12 to 18 months ago and we keep blaming the injuries. Then he puts on an England shirt and he's the old Harry Kane again. When you can't even look to your talisman to pick himself up, you know something is badly wrong somewhere.

And that's before you get to the out of form, the bang average and the contract rebels. Five months ago this squad was bulldozing it's way into the Champions League final and now they are getting picked apart by the likes of Brighton. How did it all fall apart so quickly and, more importantly, who was really to blame?

The Players.

Unnamed sources say he'd lost the dressing room. The players are bored and tired from too many years of double training sessions. Poch didn't talk to them at training but busted their balls for playing video games or being on social media.

We can all see the ever subtle hand of Donna Cullen behind the “a Spurs insider told me” leaks to the press. It's her job after all. Don't hate the player, hate the game and all that. But it does paint another side to the picture.

We've all been in jobs where it gets tougher to drag ourselves out of bed when the alarm goes in the morning. When we know the shitshtorm we're about to walk into. When our manager is on our backs and the promised replacements for departed team members never materialise.

It wears you down.

So why would it be any different for professional footballers?

They are still pulling down tens if not hundreds of thousands of pounds per week in wages. And many times this season I've wished for the weekly pay cheques to be placed on a table in the centre circle before a game to see which of them had the balls to walk out and show they thought they'd earned theirs. (CE, I'm looking at you.)

But a contract is a contract and you get paid regardless of performance. Which brings us to a major issue.

Add a growing disquiet amongst several senior squad members over their contract situations to the general malaise and you have a recipe for turmoil. The body language on the pitch and the collective drop in effort are apparent for all to see.

At some point something has to change. Either the bad seeds are rooted out (as Poch did with the Adebayor/Kaboul/Capoue crew in his early days) or the manager gets changed. And this time it was the manager who took the fall.

via GIPHY

The Lack Of Signings.

I don't care about the extenuating circumstances. Daniel Levy can make no excuses for the lack of signings during both transfer windows of the 2018/2019 season. To go that long without refreshing the squad verged on criminal neglect.

Especially at a time when Spurs were making real inroads to becoming genuine contenders for silverware.

Adding even two players ready to compete for first team places would have given some of the incumbents an incentive to keep pushing on and padded out a squad capable of competing on multiple fronts.

That didn't happen. Even Lucas Moura, who signed in the previous January transfer window, was used sparingly and has never been consistent enough to cement a regular starting place. What has happened since can be traced back directly to this chain of non-events.

Change is good for all of us.

Pochettino is famously loyal to his coaching staff and has never given any indication of looking to rotate or swap any of his inner circle out for new blood. With a lack of new players, a once fresh squad now ageing together and a lack of new ideas on the coaching front, the eventual staleness that brought the Poch era to an end was inevitable.

Worst of all is that we could all see it coming.

Modern fans are obsessed with transfers. It's a symptom of the 24 hour news cycle on the internet, social media and Sky Sports News. But it doesn't take a grizzled football industry veteran to see that Spurs were storing problems up for further down the line.

Whether Daniel Levy used penny pinching on the playing front to fund the new stadium build is another matter. But for such an experienced and venerated businessman, it was short-sighted in the extreme and has backfired massively.

Kicking the can down the road.

The squad now needs extensive rebuilding. The record signing of Tanguy N'Dombele, along with Ryan Sessegnon and Giovani Lo Celso, in the summer only scratches the surface. The cheque book will need the dust blown off it in January and next summer to satisfy Jose Mourinho's desires.

Levy has painted himself into a corner and as the inevitable spending begins you can picture Poch and co. sitting over a cup of mate wondering why it didn't happen for them. And what might have been if it had.

The Stadium.

It's impossible to know just how much the move away from old White Hart Lane was responsible for the underlying issues that finished Poch off.

Going from fortress WHL to spending a season and a half at Wembley was always going to be difficult on the players and supporters. The constant uncertainty last season of when the move “back home” would happen didn't help.

But it's the stadium build and reported increases in costs that would seem to have had the main impact. There is no doubt that the lack of signings for a whole year was caused 100% by the club's financial focus being on completion of the new stadium.

For the future of the football club, I can see why. This is a £1 billion world class sports arena. It really is one of the best venues for sports anywhere in the entire world. And credit for succeeding in pulling that off must go to Daniel Levy and his team. But it came at a massive cost on the pitch and in the dressing room.

How typical of the footballing gods to bestow the greatest footballing side of my generation on the pitch at exactly the same time the club have to focus on finishing off a hugely expensive new stadium.

Remembering "Cashburden Grove".

How we laughed when the neighbours down the road were forced to “sell to buy” for years after moving to their new digs at Ashburton Grove. It's not so funny now, is it?

The real pain for Pochettino will be when he sees the financial benefits of increased matchday revenue and the rest start to filter through to supporting the footballing side of the THFC business (I say VERY hopefully). He took the pain for someone else's gain. Such is life as a football manager - especially at Spurs.

Poch Himself.

Poch isn't without blame himself though. He re-invigorated the club, he helped push us to the level we'd aspired to for many years and he is without a doubt the classiest Spurs manager of my 30 odd years supporting them.

But…

Flirting with the big boys.

There is no denying that he did little to quell speculation about leaving for a variety of other jobs during his time at Spurs. Real Madrid. Juventus. Bayern Munich. Manchester United. They all supposedly came a knocking or at least their representatives tentatively did and we all knew about it.

The lack of outright denials and at times cryptic press conference meanderings from Poch around the subject didn't always sit well with supporters. But we closed our eyes and let it slide. Football is only a game after all and a man has only one crack at his career.

We didn't tut loudly when we took him from Southampton so why should it be such a major sin for one of the top table to do the same to us? I never said football fans weren't biased or one-eyed.

Balague and The Book.

And as much as I enjoyed reading about the inside machinations of Poch's Spurs in his book Brave New World, it never sat right that it was done while he was still in the job. It was a little too close to home especially parts that named individual players and incidents.

It's hard to see how the book did anything for squad morale, much less club confidence in their dirty washing being aired in public further down the line.

With players being hammered over their social media activity, it was a tad hypocritical for the boss to bring out a warts n' all book from behind the curtain. Made for good reading though and, at the time, once again, I (and many others) glossed over it.

In hindsight though, it was a mistake. At least with Mourinho we won't have to wait for a book, he'll just blurt his thoughts out any time a camera or microphone is thrust in front of him. Maybe that's progress.

Trying everything.

Poch struggled tactically too in recent years. Constantly tinkering with personnel, we've clocked up over ninety games in a row with a different starting line-up. That doesn't sound like a manager confident that he knows what his best side is. Or how to utilise the players he does have at his disposal.

His use of subs had a distinctly amateur hour feel to it and if that sounds like nit picking then watch back some of the games we couldn't close out over the past season or two. The refusal to shake up his trusted coaching staff didn't help in that regard either.

Raising The Expectations Too High, Too Soon.

Ultimately, it's difficult not to feel that Poch was simply a victim of his own success. Coming at a time that turned out to be less than ideal in terms of financial support from the boardroom, it only heightened the feeling of “what might have been”.

Watching Spurs in a Champions League Final should have been the proudest moment of our Spurs supporting lives. And in many ways it was. Sissoko's handball after a minute and a limp performance can't take away from that.

But it should have been clear to all concerned that the peak had already been crested at that point and there was nowhere for this phase of the Tottenham Project to go but down - and quickly.

Even the run to the Champions League final merely papered over the cracks of what had turned into a disappointing season. The away league form I touched on before had hit the skids months before the Ajax games.

And fans were more than a little concerned that we were freewheeling into port rather than coming in under full steam. The lack of new blood the summer before had come home to bite us.

As we knew it would.

Consistently beating par.

Going on a league table of wage bills, Spurs have been steadily in sixth position in the Premier League under Pochettino's management. Four successive top four actual league finishes is as much of a sign of how far above their weight they actually punched in that time.

But there were no trophies. Not even a League Cup or FA Cup to celebrate. The semi-final hoodoo might have finally been broken by Lucas Moura's injury time winner against Ajax but it was very much the exception to the rule during Poch's reign.

He never really seemed to have any interest in the cups at all which, again, never sat right with the old school fanbase.

But it's almost 2020 and top four is the Holy Grail these days. Not a tinpot trophy that lost it's lustre somewhere between the last time Spurs won it in 1991 and the year Manchester United decided to not even take part. And even that was 20 years ago.

In that way Poch's priorities perfectly mirrored those of Daniel Levy. Champions League or bust was the aim and the fact it was done on a shoestring made it all the more palatable in the Spurs boardroom.

It also gave a false sense of security that done once, it could be repeated over and over again, even though the main competitors were all beefing up their own squads while Levy got his hi-vis jacket and hard hat on.

It was bound to end in tears - and it has.

It should have been brought to a close by all parties after the disappointment in Madrid in June. But no-one wanted to be the one to call time on it.

Poch had (naively if not quite foolishly) said he would leave if we won. We'll never know if he meant it but it was a noticeable sign of where his head was at with regards to the job of re-building.

After licking his wounds in Barcelona after the final, he came back in body but never in spirit. Even a few good signings couldn't re-ignite the spark and that filtered down quickly to the players.

It's sad for all concerned but the world keeps on spinning. Poch and his band of merry followers will get another chance at another club and every Spurs fan will wish them all the very best.

Don't look back in anger.

We'll always have Amsterdam and a collection of other great memories. Battering Chelsea and Manchester City. Leap-frogging the Goons. The last game at old White Hart Lane.

Those memories won't disappear quickly. We have them to cherish but there will always be an element of bitter regret.

“What if” we'd bought a couple of players in the summer of 2018? “What if” Sissoko hadn't lifted his arm in the first minute of the Champions League final?

What if? What if?

What if indeed.

Good luck Poch. Wherever you go, you'll always be one of us. Hasta luego, amigo. COYS.

It's something of an unwritten rule that the best way to get over procrastination on writing new material for your personal website is to rip it all to pieces and port the remains to a new Static Site Generator instead.

I keep telling myself that it does strictly meet the definition of shaving the yak as it it should improve performance or give encouragement to write more which makes the sunk cost of doing the migration worthwhile.

Or so I keep telling myself as I said.

What Did You Do?

I migrated my personal website from one Static Site Generator, Gatsby, to another, Eleventy. Looking back at the article I wrote when I first moved the site from Wordpress over to Gatsby, it was almost two years on from the last major development.

Which says a lot: either about Gatsby and how well I got on with it. Or the fact that one whole year of that time was 2020 when it was difficult to find a break from my busy Twitter doomscrolling routine to do anything even mildly productive or creative online.

Why Did You Do That?

I had a few reasons.

I like to try out new things. For many years while I was a corporate wage slave working for one of the UK's finest purveyors of legal organized crime (i.e. a major high street bank), I got out of the way of keeping up with cutting edge web development techniques. When I realised the world had left me and my “classic” ASP talents far behind, I figured I'd have a crack and see what I could pick up. I work with enough of the industry's top front-end engineers now to realise I'll never be good enough to be a professional in this arena but I do like to tinker.

Gatsby was getting a bit complicated. I'm a hobbyist at best and just like to be able to fix problems and re-jig layouts if I need to without getting in proper (paid) support to do it. To be honest, I've got enough on my plate keeping up with developments in the data world to also add constantly learning new front-end frameworks and everything else to the mix. I kept reading that Eleventy was a simpler option out of the box so my interest was piqued.

Reputation is everything. Gatsby's PR last year was poor to say the least. They had a couple of serious issues with employees publicly calling them out for poor behaviour towards their staff and it definitely put me off the project as a whole. I work in tech and did 12 years in banking, I know there are no real Snow Whites out there but, when it's for personal side projects, I don't feel any compunction to stick around if something smells off. Conversely, Eleventy creator Zach Leatherman tweeted last week to warn any supporters that he wouldn't accept any disrespecting messages they posted about Eleventy's competitors which was a much more welcome message to read.

What is Gatsby?

Gatsby is a React-based open source framework with performance, scalability and security built-in.

Check out the GatsbyJS official website

What is Eleventy?

Eleventy is a simpler static site generator.

Check out the Eleventy official website

What I've Found So Far.

I use my personal website as a place to post my own articles, stake out my own little spot on the world wide interwebz and try out the occasional new technology when the mood takes me.

With that in mind, I wanted something lightweight that let me use my existing Markdown articles and gave enough ease of CSS control that a design amateur (to say the least) like me could change some colours if he needed to.

Under Starter's Orders.

I went with Joseph Dyer's excellent Skeleventy starter. It uses Eleventy, TailwindCSS and SCSS to make a single blog with categories and featured images which was perfect for my needs.

The setup and format is a million times easier to get to grips with than my last Gatsby effort which got a tad too complicated for me with Typescript and a lot else besides.

Was it the right move?

I was looking at three main components of my experience and outcomes to be able to judge it as a successful move:

1. Ease of tinkering.
2. Build time.
3. Page speeds.

It has to be said that Eleventy so far has far exceeded my expectations on all three counts.

• Nunjucks as a rich and powerful templating engine for Javascript has been a dream to work with. I was a fresh off the boat noob a few days ago but it's as rich, fast, lean and powerful as the Mozilla website promises.
• Pulling in JSON-based data files as Eleventy global data files is really simple. So much so that I thought I'd done it wrong as it just seemed too easy straight out of the metaphorical box.
• The difference in build time is where it really blew my mind. I use Github as a repo for my files and serve it up through Netlify which has been a hell of a partnership for the past couple of years. The last build I deployed using my Gatsby version came in at 5 minutes 40 seconds. For a site of less than 100 pages, that felt pretty slow to me. Eleventy knocked out the exact same content and full site build in a mind boggling 1 minute and 4 seconds. No typos. Unbelievable performance from the boy Eleventy.
• One of the big reasons I shifted to a Static Site Generator from WordPress in the first place was to overcome the shockingly bad performance on a generic cheap web host. Gatsby really knocks this out of the park so I can't complain in any way about it. But...take a look at what the Google Pagespeed Insights numbers are for the Eleventy build. Smoking.

Job well done?

In a word, yes. I'm more than happy.

Would I immediately go and re-do all of the other business sites I've done in Gatsby as a result? No. I wouldn't go that far just yet. But if I ever went for a major redesign I would be tempted, especially if I put some time into getting to grips with TailwindCSS a bit more.

The real proof of it being a worthwhile time investment will come when the new site encourages me to write a new article on it. Which, seeing as I've just written all of this, it's done already...

UPDATE: As of early November 2024, I've given up on Twitter altogether. You can fill in the blanks for the reasons why. I now reside over at Bluesky instead where I am currently curating some new lists to doomscroll over instead.

I've realised recently that I have a bit of a problem.

This is the part of the sit-com episode where the main character admits this to a group of friends and they start to mention all of the problems that they see in them but don't say the one they themselves were ready to ‘fess up about. (You'll notice there is no comment section at the bottom, I'm heading that one off at the metaphorical pass).

No, the problem I've got in mind is my addiction to aimless Twitter doom scrolling.

Now don't get me wrong, Twitter itself isn't necessarily the main problem. Yes, it's a gaping gateway into hell in many parts but then so is a walk up the street in our town on any given Saturday afternoon.

My attitude to Twitter is much like Homer Simpson's attitude to alcohol - for me anyway, it's the cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems. I've met some amazing people all across the world on Twitter and been introduced to a data community that is more than willing to help each other learn and grow.

I've also been dragged into reading far too much horrible commentary on politics, current affairs and football fandom with the resulting blood pressure spikes and inability to switch off the mental outrage.

Just one more hit.

The worst part though is the endless search for the dopamine hit of new information. The FOMO. The constant reaching for the mobile phone while I should be concentrating on something else.

Watching football, check Twitter. Watching a TV show, check Twitter. Chatting with the family, check Twitter.

I don't even post that much any more and certainly nothing of earth-shattering relevancy to aid my professional standing. It's not like I'm checking in to see what people are responding to on my hot data takes or long form analysis articles. It's literally aimless refreshing and it has to stop.

And yet, I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There will be no cutting off of my nose to spite my face here. I just need to be more deliberate in how I use this platform and how I take back control (ewww, did I really type that?) to make it work for me.

How to solve a problem like… Twitter doomscrolling addiction

It turned out that an answer to this very problem was staring me in the face all along. And it presented itself in the most unlikely (and also likely) of places - right there on Twitter. (See, I told you it held all of the solutions to life's problems…)

I read posts from Creative Boom editor Katy Cowan and web designer Dave Smyth that suggested Twitter lists were the way forward.

First, you create a series of personally curated private lists and add relevant Twitter accounts to those. In my case, I went with my main interests of Data, Football, Tech, Writing and a handful of other smaller ones.

This immediately helps solve the context switching problem of the traditional Twitter timeline. Football transfer news one Tweet, linear regression explainer the next and a post about how to unfollow everyone on Twitter the next.

It's not a silver bullet for this problem but only looking at one list at a time definitely cuts down this concentration destroying issue for me.

This isn't going to be easy. Brace yourself.

Next step is probably the hardest. Once you've added all of these folks to one or more of your lists, it's time to unfollow them. Yes, I said it. Unfollow the lot of them. Every single one. Even your partner and best friends. If your Following count doesn't equal zero at the end then you haven't fully committed.

This may lead to difficult conversations with Twitter folks who haven't yet realised the reality of follower counts being nothing more than a vanity metric. (And they are.) But it's a necessary step to going list-based so what's the worst that can happen? They unfollow you? Follower counts are vanity metrics remember? As you were.

The Twitter purge continues.

So you've created and populated your lists. You've unfollowed everyone you spent ten years following and dealt with the resultant blowback. What's next?

If you're feeling like a proper digital cleanse, you can push on and do the really unthinkable - delete your old Tweets.

Katy's post goes into the nitty gritty of how to backup your Twitter data then use automated services to do the deleting for you. I used TweetDelete and have set it to delete anything over 3 months old on a regular basis.

It's not that I've got anything particularly controversial or character destroying lurking on there (that's what they all say, isn't it Al?) But Twitter is meant to be an in-the-moment flow for me, not a permanent record etched in stone and carried around forever.

My most liked and retweeted Tweet of all time was a photo of a Spurs player doing a grimacing face. We're not losing the Ancient Library of Alexandria here…

Replacing an old friend.

The only thing left for me then was to remove the now virtually useless Twitter app from my phone. That part was hard. We'd spent a lot of time together over the past few years but that was the problem and there was no room for sentimentality. Off you pop.

On desktop, I could move over to Tweetdeck. It's not the most friendly of interface but at least it lets you line up columns for each of your lists on their own. To be honest, I don't want something too user friendly anyway as a little bit of discomfort in use should cool my jets on continually flicking over to look at it.

On mobile, I've gone with a third party Android app called MarinDeck. It works like a wrapper around the Tweetdeck web interface and gives the same columnar list view. Again, it's not as good an experience as the Twitter app but that suits me just fine for now.

So is this me for life?

I feel a little like Henry Hill at the end of Goodfellas with all of my best Twitter memories behind me and a Twitter life with the spag bol equivalent of egg noodles and ketchup in front of me. But that's a pessimistic outlook.

I've taken the first steps to reclaiming Twitter for my own good and have the full intention of sticking with my lists and zero Following count to make that work for me. I'm going with the mantra of “more creation, less mindless consumption” for 2022 and this feels like the best way to start that off. I'll check back in after a few months and update this post with my findings.

For some recommended reading on the subject, check out Katy Cowan's post on unfollowing everyone on Twitter, embracing lists and deleting old tweets and likes and Dave Smyth's on Twitter lists which were my inspirations to give this a go.