Website updates

Notifications of significant updates to this site (outside the blog section)

18
Apr
2022

New website!

As you’ve probably noticed if you’re reading this, I have a new website. It’s very much like the old website, except that (a) it’s on up to date versions of everything, from WordPress to the underlying database, and (b) it works. The theme powering the old site – a theme which I liked very much, and which I paid money for years ago – had been unmaintained for a long time, and a recent WordPress update broke it beyond my capability to bodge.

Rather than just sub in a new theme, I took the opportunity to rebuild it from scratch and thus get rid of some of the background cruft from 2016. One result is that some old posts might not quite look right, or in a very few cases might actually have missing images, due to plugins that they depended on being gone. If you find anything missing, rather than just ugly, please let me know. Similarly, if you find anything that looks wrong on the main pages, please tell me about that too. If you mostly want to complain about the kerning of one or two of the Google Fonts that I’m using, join the queue – the “SIMON WALDMAN” title text has been tweaked manually and it still doesn’t look quite right. I’ll probably get used to it.

On the plus side, everything should hopefully be a bit more maintainable now. And I might even get around to writing up one or two of the posts I have drafted. Maybe. If I have time. Perhaps.

Posted by simon in Website updates
07
Nov
2019

PSA: Change of twitter handle

When I started studying energy, back in 2010, I started a Twitter account called @simon_on_energy. Some time later I specialised in tidal power for my PhD. Later still, when I thought I might be moving to more general physical oceanography rather than just energy, I renamed the account to @tidal_simon. Now, with my new role, I’m likely to be working more generally on renewable energy again… and, let’s face it, that’s what the account had been tweeting all along.

So @tidal_simon has been renamed again, back to @simon_on_energy. The content won’t change; it’s still energy, environment, and academia, with a bent to the maritime. Probably still some oceanography, because oceanography is cool.

I remain aggrieved that @semidiurnal_simon is too long to be a Twitter username.

Posted by simon in Website updates
30
May
2016

A new blog

A blank notebook.

Image by Domas, licensed CC0.

Many, many, PhD students start blogs during their study. Some do it at the encouragement of their supervisors, and some of their own initiative, but most do it in their first year, full of enthusiasm for the adventure ahead. That is not me. Or at least, parts of it are not.

Hi, I’m Simon. I’m a PhD student based in the Orkney Islands in the far north of Scotland. I’m in my final year of study, working at the intersection of physical oceanography, numerical modelling, and marine renewable energy.

The genesis of this blog was prompted by the exciting news that, thanks to a recent grant, I will be spending some weeks doing research in Japan this summer. I hope that this can be a place to reflect on my experience there, both for my own benefit and to interest others. Perhaps it will be abandoned after that, or perhaps it will grow to cover other topics. Perhaps it will be valuable productive procrastination during my writing up, or perhaps it will be neglected as final-year pressure mounts. Time will tell, but either way, I hope that it will be worthwhile reading for a little while.

If you want to keep up with new posts, you have a few options:

  • You can check back here regularly. I make no promises as to the frequency of posts, so I don’t advise this option.
  • You can subscribe to the RSS feed. Outlook will do this, as will plenty of dedicated software and cloud systems.
  • You can use IFTTT, or similar, to subscribe to the RSS feed for you and notify you when there’s something new (by email, or whatever else you choose).
  • You can follow me on Twitter, where I will announce new posts. You will also have to put up with a modest output of other tweets, mostly around the topics of energy, environment and academia. Who knows, you might find those interesting too!
Posted by simon in Website updates