James's Weblog

On 4th February, at Trinity Church Scarborough, I led a teaching evening on the subject of assisted dying. I won't rehearse the reason in this blog post, as it was all covered in the presentation. Suffice to say that the UK government is currently debating a private member's motion to legalise assisted dying.

Not everyone could come to the evening, so we produced a video version of the resource. This material may well interest people wider than our church in Scarborough, so I'm sharing it here.

This is the third post in a series. I wrote about my experiences moving this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, and then zeroed in on theming the site using Radix as a base theme. Out of the box, Radix subthemes don't generate sidebar regions for block placement, something many websites want.

As a way to illustrate theme development using Radix, and as a recipe for a common site-building requirement, this post will walk through how to add sidebars to a Radix subtheme.

Many modern Christians are familiar with Jesus' parable in Luke 14:15-24. The NIV entitles it, "The parable of the great banquet". I wish to give it a new name temporarily: "The parable of the great excuses". Although, once we've looked at it in context, we shall see the NIV has the emphasis right after all.

I recently wrote about my experiences migrating this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. In that post I said that I would write separately about my experiences theming the site. This is that post.

I was broadly happy with the look and feel of the Drupal 7 version of the site, so didn't want something vastly different. At the sametime, I wanted to make sure that I was using the most maintainable underlying code, behind what end-users see.

I've finally updated this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This post runs through my experience of this upgrade, including explaining why I bypassed Drupal 8 and 9, and why I didn't upgrade straight to the latest Drupal 11. Overall, I'm very positive about running it on Drupal 10.

For a long time, this website has had a sidebar giving details of one book (at random) on my bookshelf. That sidebar linked to a page giving the covers of every book on my bookshelf, from where you could get to another page giving a sortable table of covers, titles and authors.

I've temporarily removed that, but plan to put it back.

I've removed it for two reasons.

Over the years, I've taken various different approaches to reading through the Bible on a regular basis. I've tweaked and adjusted as I've discovered what works best for me, and what best feeds my soul and my personal walk with Christ. Approaching new year 2025 is a good time to pick up the habit of reading through God's word. What works for me may not be what's best for you, but this may help you do something rather than nothing. Read what I've been learning about how to get the most from this. Tolle lege!

I run a webserver on Virtualmin, and it also handles incoming email. Sometimes some more details help people apply what I'm about to write to their server, adjusting for any differences they may have. So I'm using AlmaLinux 9.5, Postfix 3.5.25, Procmail 3.22, and SpamAssassin 3.4.6. The system has Perl 5.32.1.

I got errors (Subroutine File::Spec::Unix::canonpath redefined at /usr/share/perl5/XSLoader.pm line 111) after adding the razor crowd-hashing spam detection tool into my SpamAssassin system. Nobody else online seemed to have the same problem. Here's how I solved it, in case it helps anybody else.

This morning, at Trinity Church Scarborough, we continued our preaching series in the book of Proverbs, looking at Proverbs 25-29.