Unless you are severely visually challenged and accessing this blog via some wonderful tool that reads things aloud for you, you will have noticed that the visual changes continue. (Oh, and if you are visually challenged and do get this blog aurally, do get in touch with me, I’d love to hear from you!) I fought on today with the new system and it’s eaten perhaps four hours of the day. Having said that, I do seem to have made a bit of progress. It’s a bit like cycling with a flat tyre, no chain and only one leg and following directions from google maps but there is some progress! I think the site loads faster now (a nice but unintended outcome), I do think it’s starting to look a bit better in some ways with some visuals that work, and others that don’t. I can see some things I can fix as part of the learning curve about the visuals and some things continue to completely baffle me. One casualty is that all my lovely ‘photos of Chartres have, at least temporarily, disappeared. A bit like a sink hole of enormous size coming up behind me and eating part of my route. I’m sure I can fix that at some point and even get more ‘photos up. One big gain is that I am, finally, getting my head around how to mount maps you can play with. If you go to http://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/maps/overall-map/ you will get a map of Europe. That’s not much, you could have got yourself that just by clicking on http://maps.google.com and pulling up a similar view of course. However, I think it’s a step toward my being able to put the routes on there, and waypoints, comments and ‘photos. Another page http://www.psyctc.org/pelerinage2016/location/compostella/ really isn’t working properly at the moment, at least, not on my laptop or on my ‘phone, but it does give a taste of a map with a marker and a ‘photo. I see long hours ahead really getting all this to work properly.
All of which is pretty boring unless you’re a sad geek like myself. Correction, most of which was pretty damn boring even to myself, a sad geek. The point of reprising the journey this summer wasn’t just to get a better site up, with all or some of the things I always wanted to get, it was really about another psychological journey, exploring why it is that I operate as I do, or perhaps, how it is that I do and how it is that that brings me satisfaction, fulfilment and fun sometimes, but also a lot of frustration and bitterness at worst. If I don’t blog, I don’t really try as hard to think about that as I could, I just go on being, doing. Doing the ride, being the person on the saddle, and walking around with Toto safely locked up, was very different from my normal way of being and doing. That’s one simple constituent of any pilgrimage: you are out of your ordinary realm. If you’re really lucky, and I was, you have a wonderful time, and I did. If you’re really lucky in another way, and I think I was, you come back a bit altered, at least a very little bit more free, you aren’t quite as trapped in your own backyard by the rhythms, habits and even the relationships that organised you before you went.
One thing I’m recognising through these almost masochistic, well, almost self-harming, struggles with IT, of which the struggles with WordPress, Divi and the rest are a good example, is that I make choices to have the struggles. I really could do with either becoming magically more IT competent, which isn’t going to happen, or I need to be able to understand these choices better. Enough, this is a test of some aspects of the poor bedraggled phoenix of the site, slowly reassembling from its own ashes … and it really will do for today!