If you’re a fan of Fawlty Towers, the hit British comedy from the 70s, then you’ll love The Dining Experience. Apart from the entertaining “shows” the three actors put on, you’ll, of course, be eating a three-course meal.
In Cork, they performed in the Metropole Hotel, so the food was great. Portions were small but it’s the experience you’re paying for and I have no hestitation in recommending it if you’re at all familiar with the show!
The Speculative Loading plugin for WordPress is a plugin you should probably try out on your site, especially if you use WP Super Cache or Jetpack Boost to cache things. It uses the new speculation API that Chrome/Edge supports to load pages in the background if you even hover over a link.
It will dynamically prefetch or prerender pages before they’re requested by the visitor on your site, which means that the page will show instantly when the visitor actually clicks the link.
It doesn’t work in Firefox yet, but it won’t hurt either, as the browser will just ignore the extra bits and pieces added to the page.
The default “moderate” eagerness works fine for me. The “eager” setting appeared to load links if the cursor got anywhere near them, which was a little too aggressive.
You won’t notice your browser loading the page in the Network tab of the webdev tools, but if you tail your access_log, you’ll see the requests go through when you hover over the links.
Browse around this site, or take a look at my photoblog for a feel of what it does.
There’s more info in the make blog post about it, and this insightful comment about the wastefulness of loading pages that might not be used, especially for visitors on limited data plans, or low powered devices. That’s definitely something to think about before using this plugin. I may yet remove it later, and I’ll update this post if I do.
With the solar eclipse in the United States, and Ireland and the UK getting a partial eclipse, you’re probably sick of Moon coverage, but I would just like to point you to a couple of podcasts you’ll enjoy if you want more.
Both shows are great, but if you’re only going to listen to one, listen to The Rest is History, sorry Radiolab. But you should listen to both!
If you have even more time to spare, you should listen to the Omega Tau podcast episodes on the Apollo missions I listed in this blog post about Apollo. Fascinating listening. So many technical details.
As expected, the sky outside was a grey blanket on the island of Ireland. I hope someone saw something.
It’s good to be back in Cork today, even with Storm Kathleen on the way. I forgot to end my tracked walk when I got to Gate 26 in Schiphol Airport, and Google Fit somehow managed to pick up GPS signals every now and again as we flew home. So, it looks like I walked from Amsterdam to Cork. 🙂
I’ve no idea how I walked 2km off the coast of Ireland, somewhere south of Waterford. There was some bad turbulence on the flight, but we weren’t quite bouncing up and down in our seats!
Netnewswire is an RSS reader for macOS and iOS devices. You know podcasts? Like that, but for reading.
RSS readers have been around for a long time, long before social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. They allow you to follow updates on your favourites sites, which could also include the personal sites of people you know. Twitter used to have RSS feeds, Facebook never did (AFAIR), but Mastodon sites (and other Fediverse services) do.
This blog has an RSS feed. You can follow my interesting posts there. Chances are, if you’re reading this, you already know all this.
Anyway, Netnewswire has a “Reader View” that will load entire posts in the reader, which is very useful if a site only shares extracts of their articles. Sometimes it doesn’t load the entire article, so you’ll need to visit the site anyway. It’s a convenient way to read without leaving the app when it works.
Oher RSS readers include the WordPress.com Reader, Feedly and many more. Wired has an overview of some, as does Zapier.
RSS won’t replace social media, it’s just another way to read the news.