The joys of data transfer
OK, so, at this stage the main thing this blog is for is to find out how to import existing blog posts into Blogger. Brief summary: my existing blog uses a blogging engine I wrote myself back in 2000; it's quite a good blogging engine but it's not used by very many people because I didn't promote it enough back in the day, and so it's time to end-of-life it and migrate the existing users to something else.
Blogger has a mechanism for exporting and importing blogs. So, I thought, it ought to be possible to generate the export format, which is documented here, from my existing data and then import that. From the documentation it was clear that the format was slightly bizarre — a well formed XML wrapper around data which is actually XML and presumably also well formed but is represented as text. However, I generated stuff that looked right to me according to the documentation, and it failed to import.
Worse, the error message given was terse to the point of unusability, and there's apparently no documentation of the error codes available on the web.
End of eating dogfood
I wrote the Press Release System (PRES) back in 2000, and have kept my own blog on it since 2004. It wasn't a bad blogging engine. But I didn't promote it nearly enough, and very few people use it. So it no longer makes sense to maintain it — it's time to move to a more mainstream engine.
I can't help being slightly sad.
Site specific low cost housing for a windy site
Part of the issue of building housing on the site we're considering is the wind speed, which is high. I imagine we're all going to want homes which don't take a lot of energy to heat, and the wind-chill effect on exposed walls is going to be considerable. The parts of the site which are most exposed to the wind are also the sunniest — the southern and western slopes. Of course, one can insulate, and straw bales are worth considering.
However the alternative, given that we have reasonably steep slopes, is to get down out of the wind. And if you do that you also lessen the landscape impact of the dwelling dramatically.
We all need structures which are low cost and simple to erect (since we're likely to be using mostly our own labour).
Practicalities of 'affordable' housing
This document attempts to address how in practice we would implement an affordable housing policy if we choose to do so.
The company — that is to say us together as a corporate entity — will buy the farm and resell the land to each of us; in reselling the land it can add a burden. But that would be a burden on the land, not on the dwellings, and I don't think that's what we want. We could probably sell the land with a condition of sale that any dwellings built on it would be subject to the burden, but I'm not certain exactly how we're do this — we need to check with a lawyer.
Rural housing burden
A Just Price for housing
Standing Stone: reasons for adopting a 'just price' for housing
We live in a late capitalist society in which democratic politicians have deliberately stoked a speculative bubble in housing prices, because most voters are property owners and spiralling house prices mean that those who are already on the housing ladder feel richer. The consequence of this is that, over the country as a whole, house prices are already beyond the reach of many folk on ordinary wages. Along the Solway coast, the pretty villages have a price premium because they are attractive and pleasant places to live, but local wages are depressed. This means that folk working in the local economy cannot buy houses locally — unless they have inherited wealth.
So begins a process of clearance which is just as socially corrosive as the clearances of the eighteenth century, when the landowners enclosed land which had traditionally been common. The reaction, then, here in Galloway, was of a violent revolt by the country folk, throwing down the walls of the new enclosures and burning barns. Now, here in Auchencairn, I think the Caldows and Helen Sankey are the only people born in the village who still live on the main street (Geordie Milligan lives on Spout Row). Every other house is owned by incomers, and the native population has been effectively cleared across the burn into the bantustan of social housing. We have a very nearly complete ethnic segregation, with those who live in the old village now overwhelmingly rich and English, and the Crescent overwhelmingly poor and Scots.