James's Weblog

As those who know me will know, I love my coffee. In fact, I love speciality coffee, which is more than just a way of saying “really good coffee”. It’s a term in the industry for coffee that is farm traceable, graded by calibrated standards of taste and quality to be of a certain standard, and then brewed with care and precision. You might like to read about the “third wave” coffee movement. Coffee drinking has progressed from mass-produced instant coffee, to fresh coffee that is mass produced and then packaged long before it's brewed, to the kind of coffee I'm talking about.

As the funeral of the late Pope Francis is held in the Vatican today, the liturgy has notable points of difference from the Anglican liturgies. Those differences expose some deep differences between Roman and Anglican theology, and the surprise is that the biggest problem is not actually transubstantiation.

I've been studying Deuteronomy chapters 5-7, preparing some notes for our small group leaders. As I've been doing that, I find myself approaching Easter freshly. Here are a couple of questions for us with chapters 5-6 particularly in mind.

On 4th February, at Trinity Church Scarborough, I led a teaching evening on the subject of assisted dying. I won't rehearse the reason in this blog post, as it was all covered in the presentation. Suffice to say that the UK government is currently debating a private member's motion to legalise assisted dying.

Not everyone could come to the evening, so we produced a video version of the resource. This material may well interest people wider than our church in Scarborough, so I'm sharing it here.

This is the third post in a series. I wrote about my experiences moving this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10, and then zeroed in on theming the site using Radix as a base theme. Out of the box, Radix subthemes don't generate sidebar regions for block placement, something many websites want.

As a way to illustrate theme development using Radix, and as a recipe for a common site-building requirement, this post will walk through how to add sidebars to a Radix subtheme.

Many modern Christians are familiar with Jesus' parable in Luke 14:15-24. The NIV entitles it, "The parable of the great banquet". I wish to give it a new name temporarily: "The parable of the great excuses". Although, once we've looked at it in context, we shall see the NIV has the emphasis right after all.

I recently wrote about my experiences migrating this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. In that post I said that I would write separately about my experiences theming the site. This is that post.

I was broadly happy with the look and feel of the Drupal 7 version of the site, so didn't want something vastly different. At the sametime, I wanted to make sure that I was using the most maintainable underlying code, behind what end-users see.

I've finally updated this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 10. This post runs through my experience of this upgrade, including explaining why I bypassed Drupal 8 and 9, and why I didn't upgrade straight to the latest Drupal 11. Overall, I'm very positive about running it on Drupal 10.

For a long time, this website has had a sidebar giving details of one book (at random) on my bookshelf. That sidebar linked to a page giving the covers of every book on my bookshelf, from where you could get to another page giving a sortable table of covers, titles and authors.

I've temporarily removed that, but plan to put it back.

I've removed it for two reasons.

Over the years, I've taken various different approaches to reading through the Bible on a regular basis. I've tweaked and adjusted as I've discovered what works best for me, and what best feeds my soul and my personal walk with Christ. Approaching new year 2025 is a good time to pick up the habit of reading through God's word. What works for me may not be what's best for you, but this may help you do something rather than nothing. Read what I've been learning about how to get the most from this. Tolle lege!