14:06 UTC:

Whits now uses a new backend, called Juno, written in python and bash. The previous code that I used is going to be renamed so that the first backend is called Ceres, and the second is called Pallas, to make the naming be a progression through the asteroids.

The Whits homepage style has also changed as a result, and there will now be two kinds of notes: titled notes, and daily notes roundups. The daily roundups are equivalent to the posts what one would get in the Atom feed before, but they now have counterparts on the website. The new titled posts will be reflected in both the Atom feed and the website too.

I'm not using Avocet in emacs anymore; I'm just editing the HTML 5 raw in TextWrangler, but I'm also using a processor that has a few Avocet-like features.

Daily roundups will automatically be posted by the system at 23:59:59, whereas the titled notes will be posted an hour after they were last modified, so as to give a grace period whilst editing is going on. The intention is to recapture in the daily roundups some of the eclectic easy-going miscellaneous content that Whits used to have when I first made it, and to have the titled posts be more formal essay-like pieces that stand alone.

Please let me know if anything breaks outright in the shift from Pallas to Juno, and I'd also be delighted to hear what people think about the new design and structure!

14:37 UTC:

Yesterday I saw three hedge accentors (also called dunnocks, but as I've said, hedge accentor sounds a lot better), and what appears to have been a brambling. It looked a bit bigger than a chaffinch to me, though it's meant to be the same size. It was apparently fluffing its plumage up, though, so it was difficult to get a proper estimation of how big it was except when it flew off, and then I was distracted by its pretty meandering flight path.

The hedge accentors really do look a lot like sparrows, and are even called hedge sparrows sometimes, but their song is exquisite. Wikipedia describes it as “thin and tinkling”, which it is, but it's the tune as a whole that struck me as very distinctively pretty.

Sir Thomas Browne wrote to Christopher Merrett in February 1669 that “I confess for such little birds I am much unsatisfied on the names given to many by countrymen, and uncertain what to given them myself, or to what classis of authors clearly to reduce them”. The dunnock had been called that since 1475 according to the OED, and acquired hedge sparrow in 1530 and hedge accentor in 1825; clearly the ‘vulgar’ names are still a bit confusing, but Linnean taxonomy would probably have satisified Browne: the hedge accentor is the Prunella modularis.