It wasn’t deliberate, honest!
Firstly, its been a difficult 24 hours for me, because of this site, I knocked it off unintentionally and it wasn’t because I was doing anything I thought was stupid, but 123-Reg, my domain company has what is suppose to be “Award Winning Customer Service”.
Yeah, throw that out of the site for one minute because I want to jump ship! Added a subdomain, easy task right? Wrong!
Adding it wiped my entire DNS records. Yikes! It gets much better, I had to repopulate those from scratch, I had about 5 DNS entries on 123-Reg and about 20+ on cPanel (my website administration). Why? Well, I’m trying to fix a HTTP500 error and to do this, I had to play with some settings. I’ve kindly asked my hosting company if they will be willing to update PHP and MySQL to see if that fixes the problem, but I’ve also been removing and installing plugins to try and trap the error. I’ve also signed up for a free website as well, to see if that traps it. This could take some time, but if you go into the /wp/ folder, that version (staging) seems to have far fewer issues, so I think it could be the 3D plugin? That has been deactivated for the time being, while I do more tests.
On the other hand, I’ve also set up a public folder on my Cloud Drive, this being OpenDrive where I will occasionally dump files.
These are without warranty or guarantee, they will be raw as hell, so don’t expect anything to work in Trainz – if it does, but if you find some gems you like, use them. Link below.
EDIT (2 – much much later):
Moved to another page with another provider (Google drive), use this link (opens a new window):
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1EFy5fCBKZDrOxpK0y77By0aFYFwJIcrh?usp=drive_link
Its in a page called currently “Cloud Drive Files” which includes a source folder of previously released files, but I can’t think of a better name and is currently handled by a Google Drive plugin.
EDIT (1 – much later): I think I fixed it, some of you may of noticed that they had weird text at the top – its WordPress debug mode, which gives an idea of what is actually happening to the site, then discovered I was running out of memory.
I didn’t have time to fix it at home, so what do I do? Round up my smallest iPad (8in), take it with me to the pub as I was invited out and do everything in the pub with nothing more than an iPad with a keyboard and pub Wi-Fi over a VPN connection.
Went through cPanel, found the offending (or rather add) the offending line, first time didn’t fix it, second time did – so now WordPress is chewing 128MB max of memory on my host’s computer. Good job I got more memory available as the test afterwards shows it was only using a max of 32%, so I am guessing the available memory for server use is 1GB, if we include cPanel overheads.
Still, I don’t drink, so ended up with loads of “Pepsi Max” (I’m inpartial to Pepsi and coke!). At least it seems to be fixed for the time being.
Category: Personal
My personal blog talking about my adventures in my personal life
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Knocking my site offline.
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This joined me on the train.
I do like taking photos of interesting “things”, so this was one of them. Saw this lovely insect flying around the carriage and I had to take a photo of it then stick it on Instagram. With a load of staff (I just happened to be with) and passengers going “What the hell are you taking a photo of?”, even the guard who I was talking to as they nearly get attacked by it, was questioning it, until I took it and turned the phone around.
This was South Western Railway’s service 07:20 Portsmouth to London Waterloo service (Headcode 1P51) this morning from the post date.
Butterflies and me seem to be attracted to each other as it’s not the first one I’ve seen, I used to get harassed by one at Guildford – in the middle of November, it didn’t mind me at all, never moved when I put the camera on it either. I wonder if it was the same one? It boarded at Godalming and didn’t see it after Guildford.
Wildlife on the railway isn’t rare, I came across a lot as a train cleaner, but it does provide an interesting photo. Now I wonder if this fly had a ticket? -
More website design.
This time, its not my own!
I mentioned a couple of days ago, I did another test, just to see how Instagram worked and mentioned it was for another site. You can see this site when it’s up on https://tymaran52.wordpress.com/
Well, I went to a pub and got my iPad out, I never thought about developing a site on the worlds smallest computer, but I did it and, create a basic barebones of a site. Its only four pages. Its also proves one other thing, what peoples intentions for sites are. Her’s is to promote her dog history with the Irish Red and White Setters. Now the question I had, how do I deal with what is more like a technophobe? I.e. someone has little interest in comparison to me about computers? Well, find the easiest site to manage (I recommended WordPress as it is easy), set up the plug-ins and create the lowest amount of pages. I also used a free account on WordPress, which looks exactly like what I use to manage this site (save for some discrepancy to work within the WordPress ecosystem. I didn’t have a plan sadly as that wasn’t revealed to me, so what I did was just produce a bare bones site to get them started, which consisted of:
- Home
- Blog
- Contact me
Then tested everything. One thing I will say, producing a site, this is what I recommend everyone starts with. For a design, ask yourself the question
WHY?
For me, the question to why was pretty obvious, I have a lot of Trainz content to promote and produce, so producing a site to come to, primarily to download my content is a good start, it has a purpose. The question then I ask, “are you regurgitating anything else on the web?” in that are you actually constantly copying everyone else’s material, then I’d wouldn’t go any further because of the issues of copyright. These days, its getting worse these days as there are a lot of companies that will happily pursue you for a copyright claim, my dad has found this out.
“Are you producing original content or promoting content you produce?”, this could be products and services. In my case, a product but its for free.
Professionally “how are you going to fund it?”, mines cheap, so its currently funded by my (limited) salary. Free sites exists if you don’t mind tons of advertising, but other than that, its a consideration. If you got lots of files, the killer is bandwidth, meaning the amount you transfer to and from your site to your audience. Storage is usually quite cheap these days.
Originally, my mum wanted to do something with instagram which I hope I don’t have to explain what it is as Meta products are in our lives on line in one way or another. Instagram however, is limited, it is for displaying content for content consumption, I.e. photos and videos, its not the appropriate use if you want to talk about in my mum’s case, history of the dogs, who is who and what the tree is like. (E.g. a family tree of the kennel name of Tymaran). This is what you have to think about, your target audience, your content and your interaction. Even if it is looking for work, then again, I’m not, but I put my CV and LinkedIn profile up to say if something comes along that I like, I’ll take it!
Once you have some ideas, don’t just go out and create something, it won’t work. Plan it, even if you have HTML WYSIWYG editor (What You See Is What You Get) and thrash out some ideas to get the overall look and feel of the site. You can even do it on pen and paper, that is how I started this site but I lost the origins. Don’t copy, but look at inspiration from other sites or even the world around you. For me, I like trains a lot, so a rail map was the biggest source of inspiration, this I decided had to be the navigation bar. (Idon’t know what to do with the header, so I just added a rendering (from another project of all things), so thats why I came up with what I had. This becomes a template and a lot of sites are built like this. In reality, your template can have content anywhere, some sides like mine have a navigation bar to the left, not seen it for the ones I’ve visited to the right yet, but a lot (possibly to make it more responsive) put the navigation at the top in menus.
Now you need a story board. What categories are you going to split your site into? Trial and error on this, However, you can have multiple layers, but there is one rule to consider – 3 clicks. “Can I get to most of my content in 3 clicks or less?”. If the answer is “Yes”, its a good design, otherwise no, remember, your audience is probably not going to stick around for long. Don’t make your pages too busy either. Can you find the text you want without burying it deep? No, make it clearer. (I’ve used an “accordion” plugin for this reason on my Models page and to keep loading times down).
From there, consider your mobile and desktop users. In fact, consider your mobile more than your desktop users, why? Because I guarantee that most of your traffic will be from mobile users. A site thats hard to read on a mobile phone or tablet will deter users from using your site.
Finally, accessibility. I’ve incorporated it in this site, but as a lot of users now considered to have a disability or those that don’t have a disability but find it hard to use your site, is a turn off. If you notice, I have (an otherwise annoying plugin – sorry) that aids with that. My eyes love small text, my mum can’t read as much as I can at higher resolutions on the same screen size and she isn’t disabled. Likewise, I find black on white more difficult than white on black.
Then test, test, test. Test with the oldest, test with the newest, test with a small item, test with a large item, test with all sorts of operating systems (iOS, Android, Windows, Mac, Linux, Kindle, etc), or get others to test it for you. When it comes to testing, you can only do so much, so you’ll never have a 100% success rate.
Test the links, test to see everything loads, just test everything, create a test table if you have to. You may have to go live, but other than that, call it a day. You’re done. Well, for a static site. As soon as you go live, you are going to get a million problems. Its called Hacking, its called spam, you’ll have a lot of it. Enable 2FA authentication as a minimum and a strong password.Now call it a day unless you want to connect a load of apps.
Talking of testing, I got my Kindle out, it works on the web and noticed that some of the items produced by WordPress doesn’t work.
And if you want to go really old, sadly my old laptop also doesn’t work 🙁
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Another test! With Instagram.
This is to just link my instagram account to my site… oh wait!
This actually might take some explaining. I’ve been producing my website for a month at the moment, so my mum came up with an idea “I want to put more on Instagram for Irish Red and White Setters”.
Here’s a better suggestion, how about a full on WordPress blog and site? Well, I started it and it doesn’t have to be WordPress, it can be anything. The only thing stopping you is either
A) Skills
B) Experience
C) Plug-ins unless you want to get your hands dirty.
So, here is my trial. Oh as I am using “JetPack”, highly recommended plugin by the way, I had to turn my account into a “professional” account. On the other hand, at least I can link posts to this website now. (Another good thing with JetPack is the editing feature that allows you to update your site from your phone or tablet through an App offline, there’s something rather nice to have)
Even more importantly, I forgot to mention why I suggested it. Well, Instagram is good but a bit limited with what you can do. WordPress is a better platform for conveying thoughts, my original posts prove that and the fact I talk about development for my objects, how I did it and what I’m doing at the time. Here is an example of that:
Embedding using plugins is easy, just download the plugin and link away. However, my hosting provider, which is thankfully rather cheap, only costs me £20 a year to host and I get some nice “Softalicous” plugins which I have used extensively on this site, plus it comes with Pagelayer Pro which I haven’t used yet. Considering the site was only meant to be used to convey my personal blog, I grew it into more than that for this reason. I like talking about life and challenges but not mental health, my ultimate aim is to inspire others to come up with weird, unique and wacky ideas.
Now with WordPress, I can do that by showing how things work in the background, but I got more mad ideas coming up if I have the time. A game based on Java or JavaScript? Now if you don’t know, I’m actually 39 and I thought of an idea, why not recreate a game from my past I used to play a lot on the BBC Micro Computer (non UK audience’s may not know what I am talking about) and let everyone else play with it while giving it a different twist? How about Airlift – depending on time? -
”I’m fed up with being cooked everyday, let’s have some snow!”
He isn’t far wrong!
Now if you read my about me page, you’d realise where I live. If you looked at the weather for the past 3 months of where I live, you can see that another problem doesn’t bode well (that is being a redhead, here is a post of the problems).
I got a message from my dad while at work, it said with what the title states and to be honest, right now? I rather have snow! It is a tinderbox here. It really is!
I took these photos earlier in the month, somewhere around the 5th July 2025 while on a dog walk, that the place is just looking horrifically parched. I’ve seen it before, but never to the extent of this. We have had some rainfall, but the rainfall has been miniscule for what is actually needed within the area. An article by the BBC (Seen here – opens a new window) shows how dry it is across the UK. Bearing in mind, for me locally, its not that unusual to have dry spells as the weather system is driven by the Isle of Wight and Selsey Bill.
We are thankfully surrounded to the south by sea water, but even then, with Chichester Harbour being full of (undrinkable) water, it has been unusually dry, and the risk of wildfires continue. So far, there hasn’t been any locally, however, Portsmouth Water (our local water supplier) has asked the locals to think carefully about their water usage.
The River Lavant is qutie dry, not unusual for this time of year as what you see on the surface flows during the winter, but the River Lavant is known to flow underground as the south downs is mostly made of chalk, but what is concerning is local levels.
Its also having an effect on everything locally, -those wanting to go to the beach which means anytiime it gets warm, no one can move as West Wittering beach becomes immensely popular – so popular, it constantly runs out of parking spaces. Thats not the problem, its the lack of transport to get there which clogs up the A286, which means you really can’t go anywhere as the whole of Chichester suffers as a result. If you do get any public transport, the trains suffer with delays as there is problem with the heat on the lines causing all sorts of issues. Buses? Well, they get stuck in the same traffic as everyone else gets stuck in.
As for me? I have to keep out of the sun, my skin can’t cope with it as the UV index at times in the UK has been hitting 8.
But snow? I would love snow right now., I’ll spend all day taking photos, despite how disruptive it is – this is back in 2010 when we had some seriously heavy snow fall. We haven’t had any snow like that since 2013, if we have, its measured in millimeters, not 15cm or more!
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The site looks like its getting bigger
All through looking through my hard drive. I know a lot of people have been looking for my content for years and isn’t available anywhere anymore – this is what this site was suppose to address, but while clearing out my hard drive and putting what is left as there is a lot of duplicates on said NAS/Hard drive, I came across this folder from a previous site:
I had to edit some of the files out, but yes, that is a LOT I need to put up, in addition to what’s up already. This will take a long time to sort, so don’t expect anything to be instant (sorry). To add it and document everything, probably takes around 30 minutes an object – plus I need to validate and check it works on modern Trainz (TS2019+) which some items won’t. Pack it, etc.
I also found a reskin file for the Class 141, so that will be uploaded ASAP, so if anyone wants a fiddle, be my guest. It will be the second source item on the site (finally). Then there is the issue of space. I may run out. If that happens, I’ll start hotlinking everything off the site or talk nicely to the owner, but I got 5GB and still got some way to go. For those interested, the size so far of what’s in that folder is:
Ok, not as bad as I thought, but getting that way!
Look out for more to add of older releases in the future. For reference, if I remember correctly, this was put onto a self hosted server. Yes, I had one of those in days gone by, Internet Information System 6.0 tied to an IP address and on 24/7, I could do it all over again as I have the equipment. Its just the time and knowhow as I would use Linux these days, with a VPN server for more fun. A good way to use up your capacity. The connection is fast enough, around 2.5GB/s fibre, but then its limited to the port of the computer – which is 1GB/s as it is an old Lenovo.Going off subject slightly, for those messing with PCs and have a network to yourself, I seriously recommend having a play around, but just for gods’ sakes! Isolate your computer! Its how you learn. Also remember, a new hole in the network is a new hole that introduces security risks.
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Going through my back and forward catalouge
When I produced this site, I never thought I’ll be going through my past and present catalogue of Trainz content nor the extent of how much I made, I mean just look!
The worst bit is that is scratching the surface. There is a lot more I haven’t added and there is more in the files directory that I need to catalogue and post on the page. If you think that is bad, my Trainz install is someting else of a lot of self made stuff.
Shows you that even though I am quiet most of the time, in the background, I am actually working away. -
It’s show time!
So I’ve worked on this site long enough and I thought I’ll start publishing it. That was the hard part. Another plugin added to allow me to move over from the sub folder to the main site. First attempt didn’t work, so I had to erase it and start again. This time it did! And just exactly how I wanted it.
It has taken me EIGHT years to get to this point, from concept to final product. I had several tries, and a lot were unsuccessful.I tried “Artisteer”, I went from WordPress to Joomla with no success for the templates, I tried other template builders and other web authoring tools (Dreamweaver, WYSIWYG, NetObjects) and all this in my spare time. I couldn’t even open up my old site in NOF and it was the same version.
All it took was a new site with an accidental discovery, I could do what I always wanted to do, create a template using WordPress and that was 3 weeks ago from memory. A static to a dynamic page. It took me a long time to get here but I f inally done it.
It is based on WordPress’s Twenty Twenty Five theme with a lot of customisations, so you will see some WordPress-like stuff in here and the side bar will disappear on some pages as templates – I’ll fix that in due course. As I was creating this one, I found another experimental WordPress site I started in 2016 that I forgot about, so I amalgamated all the posts over to this site which is why there is a gap between 2018 and 2023. Actually, this site was started because my mum suggested it with my mental health issues, to start blogging all over again and talk about it – anything previous to those doesn’t exist as it was on Joomla (which got deleted), I do have a “Live Jornual” out on the web somewhere which was from 2003 to 2008 when I got too busy.
Still, feedback is welcome and here is a screenshot of the current site together with the old WIP site and the test page from 2017. I hope it will look more like it in the future. Also somewhere, I have an open office drawing somewhere and that is the original concept.
Comments? Please let me know. I’ll update my CV in due course with the web addresses and the rest of the pages. -
More site development – the side bar
And I worked from home today, spending quite a bit of time on it.
This must have been the most frustrating aspects of creating a WordPress site, but I cracked it finally. The good news is once I create it as a template part, that’s it, it all automatically updates when it refers to that template part…. That was the easy bit!
The hard bit? I did some settings changes and I wanted a load of images to represent stops on a route map, so I created a load of images (the LinkedIn, Facebook logo and donate button come from their respective owners and added to the site that way, reduced to fit the side bar).Previous for a few days, I created a navigation bar with just links to pages, seen in the below screenshot, it may disappear by the time you look at the page.
(Lost the image)
But… that’s where the fun changes, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get the images to accept a link, until I looked at the top bar where I made a UI change in the settings… oh…!
Now it works. Next task, to get it to change colour when you hover, it will look slightly weird but I’ll try and keep the affect down, the plan is to go orange.
It took me YEARS to work out how WordPress works and now I am learning it in less than 7 days. As for the links to the LinkedIn and Facebook profile, I have customised it in that I used a HTML modification and good job I remembered good old <a href=””> </a> tags! <img src=””> is another one, <p></p>, <list><li></list>, I think I got the basic ones covered.
The most ironic part is, how WordPress is driven, its basically a giant database with some PHP coding to pull and push data, so a simple query of “SELECT aboutme FROM pages” in the background. I think I got the syntax right for SQL, someone comment if I am right or wrong.
But anyway, all the links and HTML files are actually stored in a database and then spat out and shown on your display. The images aren’t, they are just linked to an area on the site.If you are wondering “can I do this in another database like Access?” In theory, you could, but it won’t be web capable and in fact, most computers couldn’t access your site. However, if you wrote a VB program, you could output the data to a VB file and have it display locally.
(Oh as for the file I used, here is the raw unedited file I used to create the bar with. Its mostly all standardised and I turned on the layers and and when required).
EDIT: Oh the buttons, if you want the PSD files, you can down them by clicking this text. -
Donate button appearance
Something you may of noticed that’s been added to the sidebar is a donate button. I’ll be clear first, it is completely optional. I’ve tried to put it in an unintrusive space, so you don’t get bombarded with it being put in your face and this will be the only place I will “promote it”. I’m not going to push it in everyone’s face as I am not like that. I’m not driven solely by money. I got targets, I got desires, agreed, but money is the root of all evil so I’m trying to not get corrupted by money and its problems.
You can find it here:
(Donate an amount to me – OPTIONAL)
The reasoning behind it is simple. I’ve had a few comment on my work and its quality despite being unfinished and the time I have. I don’t take commissioned projects on for similar reasons (dysfunctional family, stress and other work commitments), but if you want, you can keep me going. I don’t care if it is £0.01 (1 pence) or £100.00, I’m grateful for anything. I also do everything in my spare time. As in, on the train from home to work and back. Even then I have a WiFi battle!To give you an idea of my likes and expenses and one is going to quite wild, as of 29/06/2025:
- A 2 Litre bottle of Tesco’s Coke zero – £0.49 (49p)
- Regular sized Latte for the morning commute with discount – £3.30 approx
- Tescos meal deal – £3.60 (3 items, sandwich, side and drink)
- Lyca Mobile 5GB plan – £5
- Online storage – OpenDrive – $9.99 a month or around £8. Its unlimited though. Not sure of the security aspect, I’ll be honest, the program looks older than the hills and doesn’t have versioning, but it works. There are other options, TeraBox which is based in China and I’m a bit questionable about it as you have to upload/download through their app. OpenDrive does have a WebDAV option though. OneDrive is preferred though but its limited to 1TB and the upgrade goes to 2TB. A lot of my work collectively is already near the 2TB limit.
- Waitrose shopping SBC – £10 a time
- Keeping this site going – £20 (thank god!) a year. If you want to have your own site hosted by my friends, please talk to www.cadence.net.uk (Cadence Networks). I’ve been with them for years and despite what I have said in a previous blog post, I’ve have had no issues with them at all. Just I’m unfortunate with the issues I’ve suffered has been all external and they have had to act. No, they aren’t sponsoring me to say this, its all genuine.
- Renewal of the domain – £31.61 for 2 years ☹ It was cheap at one point.
- Keeping my wessexelectricnut mailbox going (As I write this, doesn’t work with the site for enquiries, so its on my burgess.world inbox) for a year – £60, although admittedly, it’s a Zimbra Hosted box with a briefcase that reports it has “unlimited storage”, until I broke it recently. Don’t ask – turns out 11GB of meshes was too much for it to handle.
- Cheap laptop – £150 (believe it or not, a lot of my work is made on laptops with Intel HD based graphics processors)
- Used Toughbook – £500 – £1,500 (acceptable for use).
- Expensive laptop – £2,000
- Ultimate desire, Panasonic Toughbook FZ-40 with 5G modem – £4,200
In the immediate term, I’m trying to get enough money together to get my own house with a mortgage, at 39, its not easy. My dad is trying to tempt me in staying at home but at times, I’ll admit, its becoming increasingly difficult as I do a day job (Train Planning), then have to do a ton of tasks when I get home related to him and the dogs.
Getting to work, travel is fortunately cheap, I drive and park at my nearest station, that is because the travelling time by train caused conflict between my dad and me because to him, the evening wait for 45 minutes between trains to my local station is unacceptably long when Southern changed their timetable. He also has a vendetta against Southern. So £25 of petrol in my 29 year old Renault Clio (yes, the one that has the bonnet that flips the opposite direction to most cars – think Clio Williams. Actually, how many bonnets are hinged at the bumper than the scuttle these days?) is thankfully frugal on petrol – despite the hammering down the A27.
Parking is thankfully free as I work for the Train Operating Company, Rail travel is free for the local TOC but since the transfer from First to DFTO, everywhere else is now chargeable at Priv rate (75%, no more free travel for 10 boxes a year on Avanti, Great Western Railway, Hull Trains, Lumo or other First Group TOCs ☹ and no Friends and Family discounts on them too! And no, other DFTO companies, we don’t get free travel at all on them).
The only other big issue is one of my friends likes lots of holidays, but he has a different job and he gets a hell of a lot more than me. I don’t have any secondary employment, so its just my main source of income. Cost control on holiday can be difficult and he can be a bad influence, where I look at reducing my costs (and my weight), he goes out and orders quite a lot of food – which is actually quite costly these days.
So, there you have it, that’s the reasoning behind the sudden appearance of the “donate button”. As I said, its up to you. I’m not forcing you to pay and I don’t want anyone to struggle financially, if you can afford a penny or a quid or whatever your local currency is as I am British, I’m grateful for anything.