Lee Perry publisher

Work

Is depressing, I don't really want to write too much.

Still have far too much to do, far too little time to do it in, and cannot get on with delivering my strategic objectives while being drawn increasingly into the weeds - despite being instructed to get out of them. With what?

Projects

I've been working with Claude adding polish to a few personal projects that I've built.

Very much taking inspiration from Kev's Pure Blog project, all of these projects are designed to be very fast and light php/sqlite applications that can be installed easily on ordinary web hosting by uploading and configuring within the UI.

Last week I pretty much finished 1.0 of my own web analytics monitoring tool, which I'll introduce shortly. This week I've been finishing off my feed reader and web archiver. That is pretty much complete, I'm just training it to pick up more page variances for sources without feeds.

Exercise

I've trained really well this week, I ran well over the hilly Noyna course on Monday evening, running onto the back of the fast group and holding with them as they ran past.

Tuesday was my first ever Up The Tempo session at the Steven Burke centre in Barrowford. Great session now I know where to park 5 x 5 mins off 1 mins rest.

Thursday back to the track, with a very similar 5 x 1km off 1 min rest, with very similar intervals - there is just a second or two per km across the two evenings.

I'm injured now though so the weekend has been a write off, and maybe next week will be too. I knew that I felt a bit more leggy and tired this week, but put it down to a rough week at work and the heat. I should have eased off at the track though and now my hips are a mess, my abdomen is a mess, and my previous back injury has returned.

Given that I train to keep my mental health in check, this could be interesting.

Exploring

I thought the solar eclipse would be far more obvious, below being about the best shot I got of the mood crossing the path of the sun over Pendle Hill.

I went over to Accrington yesterday to watch Stanley give Colchester both goals in a 2-2 draw. I thought Stanley were much the better side, and they should have won it but for a freak looping equaliser. The goalkeeper was impeded, but he has to be stronger for me.

Then today I had the choice between watching Oldham get tubbed by Broncos, or Burnley by West Ham.

I opted for the latter and was regretting it as Oldham kept their nerve to come from behind and beat the Broncos at Boundary Park. I'll probably write about the Burnley game more in the next few days.

I expected West Ham to win and win well, they have the best squad in the division, and the most money to strengthen it - they will be promoted this season. Burnley started much more brightly though and should have been ahead long before gifting the lead to an unmarked Max Kilman at th back post.

West Ham thought they had won it in the second half with a second that should have been stopped at the byeline - not long after Zian Flemming had rattled Bothe the far post and the crossbar a couple of minutes apart. West Ham let Burnley back into the game, Flemming scoring from the spot after a really obvious and silly foul in the box. A riot nearly ensued when he ran into the net to collect the ball in the face of some pretty blatant time-wasting from the Irons.

Burnley threw everything forward, and Flemming scored the equaliser half way through injury time, firing into the roof of the net from an otherwise scrappy move.

We probably should have won, and were definitely good for the point. West Ham will go up this season, I'm just not sure they will go up playing Nunoball in a division where other teams will sit back and wait for their own chances. Though Burnley were good for the point West Ham should have been able to see this one out being 2-0 up with 5 minutes to go.

People

I wasn't going to talk about people this week, but how could I not mention Ruairidh's sister Flash who is staying with us for the week:

She really is lovely.

My second ever week note, and holding onto that weekly cadence so far. Hold on for a week of mediocrity and misery, front-ended by a fantastic 10km run.

Work

Probably the least said about work this week the better. I was hoping to launch a transformation project next week which I have pushed back to mid September as a result of current workload and resource. It is a bit catch 22, as launching this piece of software will reduce my workload dramatically - but I need to be able to configure it properly and support the launch. Very disappointing all round, contributing to a very miserable week.

Projects

Amidst the mediocrity of work though, I have ploughed on with a number of my personal projects which I'll start talking about soon. I think that they are all heading past MVP now and towards 1.0.

I have also made a cute little expense and mileage tracker for work. Not sure if it will roll more widely at this point, but for the first time ever I'm essentially 3 weeks ahead with my August expenses rather than catching up in a hurry mid September. I might talk about this project too, but a big improvement on spreadsheet, even if it's deliverable is a zip file containing that same spreadsheet, with receipt images.

Sod it, here's a few screenshots...

Exercise

I started off the week really well, following up a strong run last Sunday with an even stronger fastest 10km of the last decade holding onto the long group at Trawden AC on the Barrowford Summer Route on Monday.

My training suffered after that as work life balance deteriorated heavily, and I've not ran since - though I have been in the gym and on the bike towards the end of the week.

Exploring

One of the other benefits of watching sport at the weekend is that I find it helps to put distance between myself and work and the week. It is pretty much impossible to work while inside a stadium too.

I spent Saturday afternoon at Turf Moor watching a clearly superior Burnley side scrape past Notts County in the League Cup on penalties following a 1-1 tie, inertness in front of goal clearly unresolved from last season.

I then finished off this afternoon watching Oldham do their best to throw away a three try advantage, before winning the game 31-30 with a last touch drop kick.

People

I hate people. Other than that, not much to report this week - other than Vickie running up the Barrowford Road for the first time today - the return on my Nelson Skyline Route. While I'm very proud of her progress, I doubt she will make that mistake again any time soon.

Hopefully I'll be back next week in a more positive mood.

My second ever week note, and holding onto that weekly cadence so far. Hold on for a week of mediocrity and misery, front-ended by a fantastic 10km run.

Work

Probably the least said about work this week the better. I was hoping to launch a transformation project next week which I have pushed back to mid September as a result of current workload and resource. It is a bit catch 22, as launching this piece of software will reduce my workload dramatically - but I need to be able to configure it properly and support the launch. Very disappointing all round, contributing to a very miserable week.

Projects

Amidst the mediocrity of work though, I have ploughed on with a number of my personal projects which I'll start talking about soon. I think that they are all heading past MVP now and towards 1.0.

I have also made a cute little expense and mileage tracker for work. Not sure if it will roll more widely at this point, but for the first time ever I'm essentially 3 weeks ahead with my August expenses rather than catching up in a hurry mid September. I might talk about this project too, but a big improvement on spreadsheet, even if it's deliverable is a zip file containing that same spreadsheet, with receipt images.

Sod it, here's a few screenshots...

Exercise

I started off the week really well, following up a strong run last Sunday with an even stronger fastest 10km of the last decade holding onto the long group at Trawden AC on the Barrowford Summer Route on Monday.

My training suffered after that as work life balance deteriorated heavily, and I've not ran since - though I have been in the gym and on the bike towards the end of the week.

Exploring

One of the other benefits of watching sport at the weekend is that I find it helps to put distance between myself and work and the week. It is pretty much impossible to work while inside a stadium too.

I spent Saturday afternoon at Turf Moor watching a clearly superior Burnley side scrape past Notts County in the League Cup on penalties following a 1-1 tie, inertness in front of goal clearly unresolved from last season.

I then finished off this afternoon watching Oldham do their best to throw away a three try advantage, before winning the game 31-30 with a last touch drop kick.

People

I hate people. Other than that, not much to report this week - other than Vickie running up the Barrowford Road for the first time today - the return on my Nelson Skyline Route. While I'm very proud of her progress, I doubt she will make that mistake again any time soon.

Hopefully I'll be back next week in a more positive mood.

On my way through Bank Hall for Burnley’s first game of the season at home to Notts County in the League Cup.

I first decided that it would be useful to have my own website at the beginning of 2004 when I started heading out into the mountains with West Bromwich Mountaineering Club. I wrote my first post about a walk in the snow up Raise, near Helvellyn, from Patterdale in the Lake District in February of that year. I can still remember the small of the sausages cooking in the Helvellyn YHA as we walked past that morning.

You can still read my very first entry on this site right here.

I spent the next 8 months messing around with various free hosting providers, who were prevalent at the time, but vanished just as quickly, before obtaining my lee-perry.co.uk domain and buying my first hosting plan from macoman, who became Ariotek before later being procured by Krystal.io when their server architecture began to fail. I have had spells hosting my own server and on site ground before heading back to Krystal probably around 8 years ago.

Prior to buying the domain there also used to be a free .co.nr registrar who I had registered lee-perry.co.nr with, but thankfully no images of that design persisted into the Wayback Machine! I seem to remember writing pages of html and css, with garish granite backed image buttons for navigation.

On 19 December 2004 I uploaded a site that I had built using a gallery generator. The software set galleries into an html framework that I had built, with a number of hand rolled front and index pages, and obviously mountain lists for ticking hills on. Despite its clear agedness now, the design persisted quite well, and remained on the site for around 4 years before I began experimenting with Joomla. Though mobile responsively was not a thing back then, I seem to be able to remember being able to look at this site quite well in a mobile phone browser at mountaineering club evenings at the Globe in Reform Street, West Bromwich.

I used to spend hours poring over photographs and writing what today would just be alt-text. Somewhere I still have a full copy of this four years of my online life, that will still have all of those descriptions.

Not quite my first design then, but the earliest that I can lay my hands on. I didn't miss having to manually update and move the four cards on the right of the homepage each time I update the site and, as you did back in 2004, uploaded it to my hosting via FTP. These things go full circle, again pushing design updates to my hosting using FileZilla again now - but at least Pure Blog produces my site dynamically on the server.

After a couple decades of explaining what a hyphen was, I shortened my domain name to prry.uk this year, having consolidated all of my various projects into it. lee-perry.co.uk will be reborn shortly as my profile page on omg.lol.

I thought that I would kick off my Blaugust 2026 with my first ever week note. I'll try to get into a weekly cadence of these as a sort of retrospective.

Work

I won't ever be able to talk too much about what I'm working on - though I am working on a project that I'm hoping to launch in just over a week. That's important as it will decrease my workload significantly, selfishly I designed it for that reason. It is very needed as I've been working far too many hours, with the line between work and personal projects being increasingly blurred.

Projects

In addition, I've been working on a number of personal projects, which I'll probably talk about later in the week. One of which is a fitness tracker that has automated much of my fitness logging on this website, there is an RSS feed reader and archiver that very much mirrors what I want out of a reader, and there is also an encrypted note taking and project management application that I've built primarily to help me get my team organised around key projects. More on those later in Blaugust.

I've also downloaded the remaining wiki / digital garden from lee-perry.co.uk, which I have now cleared of content ready to use as my omg.lol profile page.

Exercise

One of the upsides, I think, of my new fitness tracking workflow is that I no longer publish individual activity links to the fediverse every time I train. As I aim to train twice a day I'm sure that can be a little overkill. Instead I plan to summarise here.

I've not climbed this week. In my frustration about something that was probably insignificant last week, I attempted to climb through to V5 for the first time. After though I felt thickening in my right index finger, and the swelling has only now started to subside - I'm pretty much ready to climb again and will likely start rebuilding midweek.

I've ridden a few times at moderate intensity, but it's my two runs this week that I'm most pleased with. On Monday I managed to hold onto the long (read fast) group at Trawden AC for the first time across a hilly Trawden Carry Lane route - a huge improvement on my best on that route. I did the same thing again today all by myself, taking 3 minutes out of my personal best on a hilly 11km Reedley route, and 10 minutes out of where I started the year.

The Great North Run is getting nearer now, but I'm in really good shape - I just need to increase the miles back nearer to half marathon over the next month.

Exploring

I did not make it over to Doncaster today to watch Rugby League, I've been moving hosting, domains and projects around ready for what I need to achieve at work next week for most of the weekend.

On the plus side, Oldham lost, as I thought they may to a strong Doncaster, but I was also able to make it down to Turf Moor for the last friendly before the season proper starts next weekend.

We lost 0-1, but I thought that there were plenty of positives to take from the performance. The play is more adventurous, the ball is moved with more urgency. If we could find some strength at the back and bite at the front, we'll be in a good place.

People

Vickie has been working busily at the allotment, and has harvested 900g and 1,300g courgettes! I'm sure she'll post about these over at her website once my indie web conversion is complete. In sad news one of our neighbours lost their lovely springer spaniel Milo on a walk this week, after a few days of searching it turned out that he had crossed the rainbow bridge in an unfortunate accident in the valley below.

I'll wrap up there, I'll try to get back to a more normal posting rhythm as things quieten down, to get going with this series regardless, and to try to be more social during Blaugust - which does not come easily!

Until next time...

Mr bayLee saying hi! from his morning walk yesterday.

It looks like another week or so of this unfortunate weather...

Not expecting to be back at Anfield so soon - My Chemical Romance last night.

Something very surreal about not feeling and being ok, while sitting in a stadium with 40,000 other people singing along to I'm not ok.