TechDistortion

Statamic

Those that follow this site know that I switched from WordPress that I’d been happily using (well, mostly happily) for over two years to a newer flat-file CMS called Statamic. A lot of people have raved about it, myself included but I think it’s important for people considering switching to Statamic to understand just what they’re in for.

It’s Not For Web-Newbies

I’m not a web developer and make no claim to be. I’m at best a web hacker - taking snippets of code from wherever I can on the web, tweaking this and changing that to cobble together something that works. Along the way I learn a bunch of new syntax for a bunch of different web languages, most recently PHP, JavaScript, Ajax, CSS, etc. A great many people on the web that want to blog want something they can type into and hit “Publish” then be done. If you are that person, start with Blogger (Ugh) or perhaps WordPress. There’s still a learning curve for WordPress but geez it’s much simpler than most of the alternatives. You don’t have to customise much, it’s simple, it’s stable and it’s free.

Customisation

What Statamic gives you is a CMS backend and a templating mechanism that lets you build your own website with a solid foundation but many of the advantages of a database style data store. It’s flat file, small and once you learn it’s structure and syntax, it’s pretty straightforward. That said, if you’ve dabbled with a bit of CSS to tweak your WordPress site, that won’t be enough. You’ll need to learn a lot more, but you can customise it just the way you like.

Cost

Statamic is a commercial product and starts at $29 for personal use. If you want to have form handling or search, that’s $49 extra each. I’ve been chipping away at an email Form Add-on and customising it but I still don’t have site search. It’s scary that search doesn’t come with the CMS built-in given that you get that with WordPress for free. Yes you could index with search engines but WordPress doesn’t do that - it’s native. There are plenty of good quality WordPress plugins that won’t cost you a cent. For Statamic the list of Add-ons is growing all the time, but honestly, if you’re hacking away with Statamic then it’s almost expected that you write what you need yourself and that costs you time.

Geek Cred

This is such an intangible, vague and mostly worthless measure of anything but alas, it motivates people to do “geeky” things and put them on display. “Hey look at me I’m using Git to push updates to my flat-file CMS” is considered some kind of badge of honour amonst web-geeks wanting to establish their geek credibility. Writing your site in Statamic is considered similarly though perhaps not quite so hard-core. If you want to do that - go right ahead. I can’t and won’t stop you. Just realise the real reason you’re doing it.

What’s The Point?

• Speed: For me at least. With Pragmatic and TechDistortion taking off recently my page response times using WordPress started to annoy me. I received no direct complaints (okay maybe one or two indirect ones) but I knew a flat-file CMS would perform better and Statamic delivers on that.
• Unique: I have a thing for unique stuff. I based my site on the Denali theme but it’s been modified beyond recognition at this point including smartphone and tablet modifications and a raft of other Add-ons. That’s much harder to pull off with WordPress with conflicting plugins especially.
• Control: I got sick of the updates that WordPress would bombard me with pretty much every time I logged in. Many updates would wipe out some of my hacks to make it work the way I wanted. Statamic hasn’t yet. Everything is self-contained within folders and subfolders and updating it doesn’t interfere with my hard work. The feeling of near total control of your content is hard to put a dollar value on.

Should You Do It?

If you want a challenge, want to learn some web-based coding (or already know some), are a control freak (like me) or are obsessed with the speed and performance of your site then yes. You should. Personally I love it.

Just go in with your eyes open. It’s not free, it’s a lot more work than you might think if you’re a web-dev-newbie and some features you can get free on other platforms you either have to pay extra for or figure them out for yourself.

Podcast Seasons

It has become more common in podcast land (wherever that is) to refer to podcasts in terms of seasons. I did this myself just recently. Sometimes there is a break between episodes of a month or more for a littany of reasons and in other cases the style of the show changes either slightly or dramatically. Sometimes the hosts change but the podcast remains the same. Irrespective the practice of splitting television shows into seasons is based more around the concept of expenditure: there is only a fixed budget to create a total number of shows each year (let’s say 20) and each year is commissioned by the network up front, writers and actors are set in motion, recording and editing happen and eventually you have a well-defined season of that show.

Can podcasts really be compared to that? If a show has a few weeks off between episodes then that doesn’t make it the next season. Production delays, strikes, sponsorship agreements and sporting events may delay shows for a month at a time and yet it is still referred to as the same season for that show. The season is defined by the group of people that produce the show moreso than any gaps during its production.

Most home-grown podcasts have little to no budget, no crew (or a very small one), no writers and no actors. They essentially run linearly from start to finish with no regular gaps of any kind. If there’s a gap but the show stays the same, how it is reasonable to consider it a new season? That alone would seem to be insufficient for the moniker. If the format changes significantly and/or key hosts change then an arguement could be made to split the podcast and call it a different season.

I’m a stickler for the correct use of terminology but inevitably there isn’t a hard and fast rule and I’m just choosing to draw the line where I see fit. I’ve used the term “season” recently to describe the change of format of Pragmatic and the move to Indie but ultimately the episodes will still be numbered sequentially and will lack the “S01Exx” that is normally associated with TV Shows.

Pragmatic Season 2

It’s time for a change. As I said to Ben Alexander when I pitched the concept of Pragmatic back in October 2013, I intended to revisit the show format and content periodically: every 10 episodes or so. Well it’s been a bit longer and at this point (Episode 20) I have decided to take Pragmatic Indie.

What this means is that Pragmatic will now be hosted here at Tech Distortion and will have a new feed URL.

The Season 1 back-catalogue will still be available in the feed and any iTunes/RSS feeds if you’re using a ‘podcatcher’ should pick up the new feed in the next few days.

Instead of the same host each week I will be inviting on guest hosts from the software, engineering and design community usually based on the discussion topic. The ultimate aim of the show remains unchanged as I attempt to provide something that other people can use constructively. In essence, to try and be Pragmatic - or at least that’s my goal.

I want to take this opportunity to publically thank Ben and the team at FiatLux/Constellation for their great work on the new Constellation website and also to Lorenzo Guddemi who edited the audio of the most recent episodes of Season 1.

Many thanks to all of the listeners past and present that have followed what I think can now be described as Season 1 of the show. There is plenty more to come in Season 2 and beyond.

How Did I Get Here?

Some people die in accidents through no fault of their own. But in this (mostly) safe society we have built for ourselves, there are few reasons why we shouldn’t live to a ripe old age. For most of us there comes a moment in our life when there is a wake up call about our own mortality. Perhaps you are the fittest, non-smoking, non-substance-abusing, healthy-eating, perfect-weight-range individual in the world in which case I suppose this doesn’t apply to you. As for me…well…

Goodness me why am I writing this? Perhaps this is a justification to anyone who asks. Perhaps it’s a justification to myself. An explanation about how I ended-up where I am and how I’m planning to get out of it. If nothing else it describes my thought processes in this debacle and may be of benefit someday to someone else out there. I honestly don’t know the real reason. For me, that’s weird.

Good God how did I get here?

Stubbornness and a predisposition to addiction I suppose. I have never taken illicit drugs, have never smoked and my addiction to Diet Coke and caffeine is just a blip on my problem radar. Doctors would rejoice perhaps with so few vices and it all sounds good: except for one thing…

I am obese. And I have been for many years according to my BMI.

The concept of a Body Mass Index was thought up by a Belgian by the name of Adolphe Quetelet in the early-mid 1800s and was refined in 1972 by Ancel Keys. Simply put it is a ratio of a persons weight to their height. My BMI currently sits at 40 which is on the line between Severely Obese and Very Severely Obese. I have had a BMI between 35 and 42 for the last 8 years and try as I might I can not reduce it and keep it off.

I’ve been this size for so long that my brain has tuned out the abuse you get from being obese. I’ve had people drive past, wind their window down and yell “Hey fatty” and “Blubber roll” amongst other things. I’ve had corporate meetings with people in suits announce “make way for John…I know you’re hungry…” Yes people in suits are just people and they are sometimes the biggest jerks of all. I’ve been called “Big John”, “Big guy”, “Big fella” and loads more by people that know my first name. It does hurt of course, but you just learn to bury it. The human need to judge based on appearance is a well understood defect in our species. Knowing that doesn’t make it easier.

That said it’s not really the reason I’m planning what I am. There’s far more to it than that. People that have always been skinny their entire lives struggle to understand what the big deal is. Believe me - I’ve heard all the advice under the sun about how to keep your weight under control from friends, family and strangers just trying to be helpful. None of it worked.

One of the big problems is that people don’t see food as something that can be addictive. You need to eat and unlike taking heroin you will physically die without taking food (although heroin withdrawal may feel like you’re dying apparently). If you haven’t seen the documentary “Super-size me” by Morgan Spurlock, then make time and watch it. In 2004 he documented what happened to him by eating nothing but food from McDonalds for a 30 day period. He gained 11kg and after a week showed signs of addiction to McDonalds food.

I’ve done what most people do in my situation: diet and exercise. With diets I’ve tried again and again but frankly I failed every time and ended up heavier than I was before I started. Recent studies in America suggest that 95% of diets fail with the weight loss regained in 1-5 years. Diets don’t work and there’s a reason they call it the Weight Loss Industry. So far as exercise goes the only time I get to exercise each day is after 8:30pm when all the kids are asleep and I wake up at 4:30am to get ready for work (late nights aren’t an option). I have a 3 hour commute by car/train five days a week. Maybe when the kids are older we can all go to the gym together or go swimming together or something at night. But for now that’s not an option (they’re all 10 years and younger) and I can’t wait until they’re old enough to start.

A little bit of extra weight is okay though right? I mean it’s not that bad? Let’s consider the warning signs that your weight is becoming a problem. I’m not talking about the fact your old clothes don’t fit anymore, you can’t lean forward to tie your shoe laces and so on - those are obvious enough and are more annoying than being an actual problem.

It starts with being out of breath. Every time you do anything other than just a gentle stroll on a level grade. I mean a flight of stairs or two, or a moderate incline you’re attempting to walk up and you’re panting like a dog. I’m carting around 50kg of excess weight and that takes a lot more energy to move around. It destroys fitness because the weight prevents you from obtaining any. That started about 6 years ago.

Then there was the sleep apnoea. My wife had noticed that I was stopping breathing in my sleep and said I should see a doctor about it. I was always tired and irritable and had trouble concentrating, but with a newborn in the house at the time, I put my fatigue down to that. That was until I was called into my managers office at work and told that if I didn’t get my fatigue under control the company would do it for me (i.e. get sleep or you’re fired). I signed up for a sleep study, was diagnosed with Severe Obstructive Sleep Apnoea and started using a CPAP machine. Within a few days of use I felt more normal again. Rested. Centered. Focussed. Years later it’s treating the symptoms but not the cause and I’m still using the CPAP every night and find that I now can’t sleep without it. That started about 3 years ago.

Then there were my feet. I imagine it sounds weird to those not familiar with diabetes, however carrying excess weight can lead to a reduction of blood circulation and a feeling of pins and needles in the body’s extremities which, for many people, starts in their feet. I noticed that I couldn’t stand for long periods of time anymore, nor could I sit on the floor for long periods of time without being in agony. Then one day I became conscious of a tingling sensation in my feet. I was just sitting in a chair - properly and ergonomically adjusted as well. Despite blood tests confirming I did not technically have diabetes yet, how much longer would it be before I did? That started about 6 months ago.

The final straw came just days after Christmas and I’m not ready to talk about it yet. Suffice it to say something inside me snapped. I don’t care about my appearance, my looks or clothing and this isn’t about self-esteem. I am happily married with four beautiful children whom I adore. If I don’t get my weight under control quickly, I won’t be around for much longer. 5-10 years maybe. A history of heart problems in my family doesn’t help my prognosis. What I’m about to do I’m doing because I have a responsibility to care about my own well being and my own future. Not just for my sake but for the sake of my family.

Drastic Times Call For Drastic Measures

On the morning of the 26th of April, 2014 (today) I am booked in to have Gastric Sleeve surgery. (By the time you read this the surgery will most likely be over) It is a keyhole operation that removes the lower half of the stomach and restitches it together, essentially performing two tasks: Reduce the size of the stomach physically and in most cases (though not all) remove physical hunger. You read that right - you stop “feeling” hungry. You still feel the need to eat but this is often referred to as “Head Hunger” when you realise you normally would be munching on something but don’t “feel” hungry in the traditional way. Tummy growls are generally gone (though not in every case) after this procedure.

I have spent close to a year toying with the idea and researching the living you-know-what out of this subject. In the first week of this year I pulled the trigger and booked in for a consultation with the doctor then the specialist and it’s now all set to go.

It’s drastic. It’s an admission that I’ve failed to control my weight using my willpower alone. For whatever judgement I get from strangers about “not having tried hard enough” by other means, my close family support my decision as they know the success rate at keeping the weight off in the long term after this procedure is extremely high compared to any diet. It’s not free either, but as I see it I have no other feasible choices. Sure I could try again with yet another diet. By the time I’ve tried and failed again it could well be too late.

Yes there are risks. There are numerous studies but we’re looking at a 3.2% complication rate where readmission to hospital is required and a 0.19% mortality rate. Complications after 6 months are essentially 0. Because the stomach stretches (it’s designed to after all) if patients ignore their new “full” feeling post-sleeve then stretching can occur and you can end up close to where you started. The figures on that are much more difficult to find, however a random survey on a Facebook page of people that have been sleeved has shown that most people (even 10+ years out) have still kept their weight off.

No walk in the park

I need to have a strict diet of no carbohydrates, no fats, no sugars and minimal protein with only a handful of vegetables permitted for two weeks leading up to the surgery. This reduces the amount of fat in the liver and makes the operation significantly safer. Post operative I’m on liquids for two weeks, purees for the following two weeks and mushy foods two weeks after that before I can try “normal” food again. In short: it’s not going to be fun. This sure as hell isn’t the easy way out of anything - which is a common rebuff I’ve heard levelled at people undertaking this type of surgery.

The end result will be worth it. I should be able to go off my blood pressure medication and hopefully my CPAP machine as well. My whole body will feel lighter and I’ll have more energy but that’s not really what I’m looking forward to the most. I’m looking forward to remembering what a ”full" stomach feels like again.

I’m looking forward to being able to exercise and ride my bicycle again with my kids. I’m looking forward to more challenging bush walks, and as a bonus I should get less insults from the assholes of the world. Most importantly of all though, I’m looking forward to living longer.