Coed Tŷ Canol, a wood pasture and nature reserve in Pembrokeshire
Kicking the tyres on my blog before setting off for Estonia
I am headed to Estonia on Saturday for SERE24, the 14th European Conference on Ecological Restoration, to learn about wood meadows and restoring nature. There are examples of wood meadow and pasture in West Wales (see the photo of Coed Tŷ Canol in Pembrokeshire) but apparently the most biodiverse and well-supported examples are in Estonia.
I’m only able to do this because of some amazing people supporting me: my wife and two children plus all the wonderful donors to my Ko-Fi campaign.
In return, I am writing up my thoughts and experiences on this, my Nature Works blog. I am actually very rusty on the writing front, so I thought I’d better kick the tyres to see how the new tech works.
Tech stack
- Blackview Tab 8 tablet - Bargain £55 purchase, really to do mobile video editing using LumaFusion for the Hope Garden but I thought it would be fun to use it as my main writing device.
- Microsoft Foldable Bluetooth Keyboard - Bought this years ago when I was still a web developer, very comfortable to use and small.
- Hugo framework - What this website runs on, super fast, very customisable, a bit geek. Because it’s a “static site generator”, there are no databases involved, so hosting with Netlify is free. All the blog posts are written in Markdown, a lightweight, plain text markup language.
- Obsidian - this is the Magic Sauce 🦄. It’s a writing app that uses Markdown, and it’s almost [WYSIWYG][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG], meaning that much of the formatting and coding is hidden from everyday users. I’m trialling it with the Estonia trip to see if it’ll be suitable for using at my day job at Natur Ceredigion and Glaswelltir Ceredigion Grassland.
Update
The keyboard has stopped working so I shall be taking my 10-year old Chromebook-running-Linux instead! Hey ho.