Updated Site and Updated Looks

Here we go! It has been a while. I finally got around getting rid of WordPress for this site. The amount of functionality and machinery required to just render a simple blog started to show its age. I just wanted a simple, easy to update, website. Eventually, I settled for Hugo, a fast framework to create websites. Moving out of WordPress required the following steps: Go to the managed WordPress installation and get an export of all posts and pages. Download all the files uploaded that are part of the site content. After multiple failed attempts, blog2md turned out to be the tool that got me the farther. It converted the export into a collection of markdown files for each post and page. It also output files for contents, but I discarded those since most of them were old ping backs. Then, quite a bit of manual clean up. Shortcodes for embedded content etc. needed to be converted to Hugo’s shortcodes. I could have automated, but the numbers were small and I also wanted to reread all the content. Move the uploads to the right place and make sure all markdown correctly links to it. At this point, I was able to create and bring up the Hugo development server locally using some random theme so I could see a working version of how the site would work. After this milestone, yes, a few more hours cleaning up content but now everything was quick to iterate. Once all the content was ready, time to move to the looks. ...

Mar 28, 2020 · 2 min · 314 words · Xavier Llorà

Large Format Photography

I finally put some of the large format photography work I’ve been doing up online at http://photography.xavierllora.net/

Oct 20, 2014 · 1 min · 17 words · Xavier Llorà

Action in 4x5 bites

As I am getting more comfortable with film photography, it seems it helps me to write some experiences and thoughts down. I just wrote down the experience of taking a 4x5 view camera out for the first time. It is more than 7 months using mainly film and being able to touch every part of the process with my hands is more rewarding than digital so far… You can read more about it at “Action in 4x5 bites”. ...

Apr 14, 2014 · 1 min · 78 words · Xavier Llorà

Reversing Course

I could not remember when was the last time I loaded a roll of film into a camera. As time moves forward, I walk backwards. That is what I thought when I enrolled in the photography course series where film was king. I had to scramble to get a film camera. The good news, black and white. The bad news, film, chemicals, dark rooms, lots of papers, and huge amounts of time invested. So I have decided to star writing about it a bit. I just hope that eventually it will make sense. I am writing these and more thoughts over at Medium. ...

Apr 6, 2014 · 1 min · 103 words · Xavier Llorà

Yet Another cGA Implementation, Now in Haskell.

A year ago, I mentioned that I always write a cGA implementation when I learn a new language. Then, I was trying to get back to fluent in Haskell. A couple of days ago, Martin Pelikan just did the same and wanted to compare implementations. So, what did I do? I looked for my implementation to post it here. I took a look at the code and change a couple of things, but I can say that the Haskell implementation is the shortest working implementation that I have ever written in any language. It is shorter than the versions I wrote in Scala and Erlang. Python could get awkwardly compressed using some functional flavor to get close to this, but dynamic typing… C, C++, Java, Go and other friends, are far away when you look in the rear Haskell mirror. Anyway, the code below implements cGA for binary strings. You chose the population size, the number of bits, and the evaluation function. Also, some of the constructs are simple and elegant that do not need much explanation (not to mention maintainability…) ...

Mar 22, 2014 · 2 min · 389 words · Xavier Llorà