Single Aspect Blog

The absence of posts in recent years and the occasional down time may be ascribed to two different causes. The former owing to my relocation from Cambridge to Cromer in Norfolk, beyond easy reach of London, and the latter to technical issues.

“November 8th 2018 UPDATE: I went round Maiden Lane with a resident and two friends earlier this year to see what had been done. The new blocks are out of scale with the older blocks while mimicking them architecturally; and the sunken gardens are badly shaded.”

My last London visit was to Maiden Lane with Tom Cordell of Utopia London fame, in order to review the changes made by Camden to pay for long overdue maintenance of the estate. The architects added a tall block for private sale, built some additional low rise housing and painted the estate. See the quote above.

Norfolk

Cromer doesn’t offer the 55 minute journey to Kings Cross that Cambridge did, day trips and blogged walks have been out of the question for some years and don’t seem likely to return. I am unwilling to spend three hours each way on a train in order to spend not much more than that time walking the streets and will have to leave that to others in closer proximity.

On a more positive note, South Norfolk has the delightful rural housing by Herbert Tayler and David Green, which Matt Wood has written of in his Ruralise blog – and for additional information is the erudite writing of that well known son of Norfolk, John Boughton, from his Municipal Dreams blog on the same subject.

Since I cannot add to their writings I will include a couple of photographs from a recent trip, of Mock Mile Terrace Haddiscoe and Forge Grove Gillingham.

What I can say is that Tayler and Green delighted in siting terraces on gently rising slopes viewable from a distance, and their stepped nature is a feature. I raised the subject of what, to me, are the slightly shallow bedroom windows under the eaves, with Tom Cordell, who said “Do bedrooms need as much light as other rooms?” and I can see his point.

Technical

The occasional offline blog has been owing to server changes and hacking. It was off for almost a year but is back now as a record of my researches on council housing and housing standards in the 2010s. The never ending server attacks with which many will be familiar have led to a steep learning curve and some innovation a little of which I will share with you here in case anyone contemplating similar may benefit.

WordPress.org is not the ideal medium for a blog unless you are prepared to put in a great deal of time and effort to maintain it and keep it free from the worldwide bot attacks that see the Apache server and SQL databases as targets to be brought down for fun.

WordPress.com on the other hand offers a stable platform from which to launch a blog where all the defensive stuff is done for you, but offering less flexibility in different ways.

A good knowledge of Linux and its most common commands becomes essential if you are to run your own virtual private server, which is not an expensive exercise initially but can quickly become so in terms of time spent keeping it running, more perhaps to be seen as a hobby than a way of saving money for those with time on their hands.

A quick list of links for reference before I sign off:-

AlphaVPS – for the VPS, needs a written guide, the Crown Cloud tutorials are good

Stack Overflow – for the inevitable questions

Server Fault – for more questions

WordPress.org – the software and instructions

Linux primer – where I started

Wordfence – an electronic moat to deter hackers. I have my own defence strategy too, which in the longer term involves going static, but for now Wordfence and my ip blocklists are keeping things running