Why?
After spending 5 years job seeking (give or take a few trying and failing to get a masters) I decided to take a hail Mary shot at getting some job experience by volunteering at a local arts charity.
This charity wanted me to work on their WordPress website.
Something I had no experience with.
They also encouraged me to make my own website to catalogue my work as proof of my experience.
This is the result: David Stockdale’s Scrapcode.
What’s “Scrapcode”?
Unless your one of the many people who discover my site because it’s one of the few sites that turn up when you search the term you may wonder what ‘scrapcode’ means.
Scrapcode is a concept from the fictional universe of Warhammer 40k.
It describes computer code that is so corrupted by warp/daemonic energies that it is itself a pseudo daemon.
This warp-infected computer code functions like a virus capable of infecting everything.
From machines to cyborgs, it constantly re-writes itself to spread as far as possible.
I feel this is a good description of my work in programming.
Popularity
This site has been commented on by people (read: spam bots) all over the world.
Here’s a list of exactly how many comments I’ve got from each country (most of which are unapproved):
Taiwan = 2, Japan = 8, Iraq = 1, Hong Kong = 7, India = 2, Argentina = 1, Italy = 5, Turkey = 11, United Kingdom = 14, United States = 314, Mexico = 1, Czechia = 1, Germany = 15, Ukraine = 4, China = 5, France = 62, Russia = 39, South Africa = 1, Austria = 1, Hungary = 3, Moldova = 3, Australia = 2, Cyprus = 1, Belgium = 1, Switzerland = 1, Denmark = 1, Seychelles = 2, Canada = 2, Myanmar = 1, The Total comments: 511(Obviously these numbers don’t include pings as they don’t count as comments).
If the cron job I set up is working correctly it should automatically update daily.
Although obviously if your listening to the audio version of this it will not be updated daily.
An explanation of the code used to automatically generate this info can be found here:
Theme
This site is created using my own custom child theme of the Understrap Theme.
I have published a basic version of it here:
I initially used my own custom child theme of the Beans Theme, however I moved to using this as I begin creating a unified theme across the various sites I made for Tees Valley Arts.
As I add new functions and shortcode to this site and others I eventually get around to posting a guide one how I did it.
These can be found under Theme Editing so if anything interests you have a look through there.
Test comment.