Best Laid Plans of Dust and Blogs

I prepared the Thursday Doors Recap post earlier than I normally do on Saturday. I was worried that my new theme might not cooperate with the URL-gathering-program I wrote that drives the recap. It seemed to work alright, but it did miss a few links. Or the participants linked to my post instead of theirs – that happens. I took note of all the things that seemed to cause problems and I added a series of messages to Thursday Doors participants regarding steps they could take to make the process smoother.

My process for building the recap page is a kludge, but it works. It involves a JavaScript program I wrote, and a spreadsheet in Excel. I won’t bore you with the details other than to say I (or someone with more skill) could probably do the whole thing in JavaScript but using Excel for what Excel excels at is much easier. Once the non-door links are eliminated, I am left with a formatted table in Excel that I copy and paste into the block editor. The editor creates a table block. Well, it used to.

Something happened two weeks ago, and the block editor no longer creates a table. Also, the mess that gets pasted in can’t be turned into a table. I’ve been having to use a classic block and create the table there. That works, but the resulting table is not as easy to work with and it doesn’t look as nice. The Happiness Engineers – I have a hot-link to them now – said they know about the problem. They suggested that, for now, I paste my Excel rows and columns into Google Sheets and then copy those rows and columns and paste them into the block editor. There’s nothing I like better than making a kludge kludgier.

The other side of the title refers to recent activity in my workshop. I installed the dust collector I purchased a year ago. I should say “permanently installed” since I’ve been using the unit for quite some time. If you followed my progress on the shop, you may recall about a year ago when I was framing the raised floor area in the back of my garage. I located the brace between two floor joists farther back than all the others. That was where I had planned to install the dust collection ductwork. The plan was to bring the port up through the floor, along with 220v and 110v electrical service and be able to handle the table saw on a regular basis but wheel in other tools as necessary and connect to power and dust collection as needed.

I didn’t install anything ahead of time because I wanted to use the shop for a while and see how it felt. I moved things around as I settled in. The layout feels great, but my table saw is nowhere near the place I thought it would be. Also, I realized that it would be easier to connect the other tools to the dust collector and electrical outlet if they were on the wall. I finished the installation on Tuesday. I have dust collection to the table saw and to my bandsaw. Each circuit is controlled by a “blast gate” so only one machine is being serviced at any one time. The hose to the bandsaw is long enough to service other tools, when I wheel them into position, and the outlet for the bandsaw can be used by those tools.

The dust collector is mounted on the garage side of the wall but controlled by a switch in the workshop. The ductwork is installed through the wall to the bandsaw and under the floor to the table saw. I had to drill through the (outer) rim joist, and one of the bracing blocks. That require another kludge – one of mechanical pieces parts. The slideshow below provides details for the DIY aficionados out there.

Back to the Thursday Doors recap page for one last twist. On Sunday morning, one blogger notified me that their URL was missing. I opened my admin page, navigated to Pages, selected the Recap page and clicked “Edit.” A message popped up – “Cannot edit page. Page has been deleted.” I’m not sure what happened, but this has happened once before, and the engineers were adamant that “the page was deleted by an authorized user” and they refused to even open a ticket. I restored the Recap page from a backup and went on with my day.