Permanent Tourist

The personal website of Mark Howells-Mead

Posts from 2022

  • Pools of light

    A good pool of light and a wet street will always draw my camera more quickly than a quaint festive scene.

  • Screenshot of the WordCamp Switzerland website

    How I used manual content structuring and the power of the WordPress Site Editor to set up what we believe to be the first non-plugin-based multilingual WordCamp website.

  • Mark Howells-Mead on the shores of Lake Thun in Switzerland

    Going on large and small adventures has always made my life a little richer.

  • A trip to England, a lack of autumn feeling despite the vivid colours and learning how to set a fire.

  • Miniature Swiss tank school

    Using 1970s technology to drive a tank through a miniature landscape.

  • The gradual arrival of autumn; clouds clinging to the mountains, fresher air and a wider variety of colours in the landscape. My favourite time of the year is coming.

  • Buttermere in heavy rain

    A wind-swept, soggy, lovely walk around Buttermere in the English Lake District.

  • Visiting the former home of John Ruskin, near Coniston.

  • An autumn ramble from our holiday rental to the top of the nearby Wainwright Fell above Keswick.

  • Unendearing travel

    Relying on others for our journey and a problematic experience stretching over two days is no way to begin a relaxing holiday.

  • A lovely month full of experiences, but fewer random photographs than usual.

  • Hiking amongst the glacial screes

    Walking into the middle of nowhere from the heights of the Furka Pass.

  • View from an easyJet plane window, 2009

    Four shots from the window of an easyJet flight from Switzerland to England in 2009.

  • Catania railway station in 2009

    Train to Messina

    Clearing out a hard drive, I came across a file with some notes made whilst travelling in Sicily in 2009.

  • Random things in July

    Hiking and keeping cool in the mid-summer alpine heat.

  • WordPress expert Mark Howells-Mead

    There are several translation plugins in the WordPress ecosystem, each of which has its strengths and weaknesses when it comes to translating and managing multilingual content. There is also the brilliant plugin Loco Translate, which I’ve been using for a very long time to translate English strings in plugins and themes. (Usually German, French and…

  • WordPress expert Mark Howells-Mead

    Finding out custom user capabilities via the REST API, to determine whether or not to add a custom sidebar in the Gutenberg block editor.

  • My main photographic focus in June was our trip to Brittany in north-western France.

  • Lunchtime dip

    When it used to get hot back in the days when I used to work in Brienz, a lunchtime dip in the freezing waters of Lake Brienz was the thing. When I worked in Bern, I used to go to the river with colleagues and float along for 20 minutes or so to cool down.…

  • I love that the pumpkin leaves are shaped like little funnels, to catch and redirect the rainwater. Now all we need is some rainwater.

  • Passers-by

    Sitting on the steps outside one of the shops in Bern’s Marktgasse a couple of weeks ago, watching the world go by.