Updates from 2021
Αὐξανέτω ἡ ἀρχή
May the territory expand
Rider, Attic red-figured cup — Middle of 5th century BC
Rider, Attic red-figured cup — Middle of 5th century BC
This archive contains all the updates from 2021 if you wish to see them once more. I have not changed anything on this page and the updates will remain the same.
ΑΙ ΑΓΓΕΛΙΑΙ
As you may have already noticed, I have decided to change the design of the website slightly to make it look a bit more interesting. The changes include the following points:
New and more icons: I have replaced the icons I had been using for the menu portion at the very top of this page with new ones which look a bit more modern and which have a higher resolution. This, I hope, ensures that they are displayed clearly and sharply on most screens; the ones I used before were much too small and barely discernible.
Encased main portion: This may sound somewhat odd, but I am not sure how else to describe this change; the <hr> tag at the very top of the page, which separated the menu portion from the content of the website, has been replaced by by something new, namely a slighly curved border. The same border — but reversed — can now be found just above each page’s footer; this basically encases
the main content of the website. These border may also contain some Ancient Greek text with some icons on either side — you sill find an example of this at the top of this page as well.
Revamped footer: The website’s footer has been a thorn in my side for a while now, as it has not been updated in over two years; indeed, if you look at the earliest snapshot of my first website (marvinjohanning.de), you will find that the footer looks exactly the same as it did on this site until yesterday. Therefore, I was very happy to see my boyfriend’s mentioning that he wants to do something about my website’s footer — which he promptly did. I used his suggestion — even though I did not do it using a flexbox as he had suggested — and have replaced the old footer with this updated one.
Additionally, I have finally stopped maintaining my former website marvinjohanning.de — I will keep the domain for obvious reasons, but if you attempt to access it, you will be redirected to ancient-greek.net, instead. The information you could find on there was outdated and my focus has shifted towards maintaining this website, instead.
Before I begin with my talking about webrings, I would like to address the Germans:
Fröhlichen Nikolaustag euch allen! Ich hoffe, es fand sich etwas Interessantes in euren Stiefeln — wenn ihr denn dieser Tradition noch folgt. Ich selbst hatte, aufgrund dessen, dass ich schon seit Längerem alleine wohne, weder einen Stiefel vor meine Tür gestellt noch irgendetwas vom Nikolaus erhalten. Ich schreibe das Update hier ausnahmsweise auf Deutsch, da ich mir unsicher bin, wie weitverbreitet das „Feiern“ des Nikolaustags im Rest der Welt ist.
With that out of the way — let’s talk about webrings. They used to be a rather popular method linking together websites that were, in one way or another, related to one another; and whilst they have become less and less popular over the years, there are still a variety of webrings still actively maintained – and I am planning on joining a couple.
As you may have noticed in this website’s footer, I have already successfully joined on of them, the Yesterweb Webring. I am still trying to figure out a better way of adding the link to my website, but it shall reside in the footer for the time being until I can find a superior method of doing it.
Following my recently having upgraded my Internet connection speed to 1 Gbit/s, I decided it was time to move away my website from a third-party hoster and host it myself — and I have now done so. It now resides on the Raspberry Pi you can see in the image just below this update’s title. I have always been someone to prefer independence — not only regarding my website but life in general — and decided that this would be the next logical step in my website’s achieving of independence from third parties. Unfortunately, I am, of course, still dependent on my ISP and the power grid, but I hope to add an additional layer of independence by adding a fallback Internet connection via LTE and a small power bank in case of a power outage. And whilst my current setup is, of course, by no means professional, I am hoping to build upon it and improve it with time so that, at the end, I shall have a mostly independent server setup.
Additionally, I have finally managed to add the first book to my Presbyterium and, thus, highly encourage you to read it. There are lots of images and a lot of things to read about the oldest book I have in my possession, dating from the beginning of the 17th century. Furthermore, I have begun working on a new shelf
, which shall house various programs and apps I have found helpful in my learning of Ancient Greek.
I am constantly looking for new ways of optimising my website and have been toying with the idea of converting all my website’s images to WebP for quite a while now — and I have decided to finally go through with it. Those who use older browsers (or Safari on anything older than Big Sur) mustn’t fear, however, as I have put a fallback in place; this means that, if your browser is unable to display WebP images, it will fall back to the regular JPG image automatically. This ensures both maximum compatability whilst also ensuring that the majority of modern browsers will download the much more effecient WebP format instead, reducing both loading times and bandwidth usage.
I sincerely hope that this decision will make my website even faster than it is already and hope that it will encourage new visitors to browse the website for a longer period of time – for having to wait for too long when clicking a new link discourages many a vistor. Page loading times should now be low enough — even on low-bandwidth connections — that waiting times should be negligible.
Additionally, I have added a few items to the navigation on the website’s header; it now contains links to quickly open my Current Projects and Updates pages. This way, finding out what’s currently being worked on and what kinds of improvements the latest update contains should be much easier and more pleasant.
Furthermore, I have decided to make a PDF version of my latest book — my translation of John’s Revelation — freely available on this website. As BoD has, unfortunately, been unable to publish my book as an e-book — citing formatting issues due to my usage of Greek —, I decided the least I could do is make a PDF available to those who want it. I have also rather sloppily converted the original LaTeX file into and EPUB which you can load onto your e-reader; its formatting is, however, abysmal, and I do not recommend using this if you can at all avoid it. Please note, however, that the printing of the PDF file (as well as the copying of text and other various things) is not allowed.
… or And so it begins
, as a certain Vorlon would say. I have finally taken it upon myself to continue working on my website, albeit slowly. As I have been rather busy as of late — both with school and work — and have not really had the inclination to continue working on my book or my website, I have done but very little work on both my website and my new book. I have, however, slowly begun being more productive concerning this as of late — though God knows why that has happened. This does have the, hopefully positive, implication of my website receiving some more updates.
I highly urge you to check out the page regarding my translation of the Gospel of John, as I have added my translation — including the original and the transliteration — of the first three chapters of this book. The page containing information about my new book has also been updated to include some more in-depth information than it did before. Additionally, all my books can now be found on my own Gitea instance, git.marvinjohanning. Everything found thereon is — as of yet — but a mirror of my GitHub repositories. I do, however, believe that having an off-site backup, so to speak, is advantageous; and should I ever on a whim decide to ditch GitHub — as I have, in the past, ditched GitLab —, my project will continue living on within the above-mentioned domain.
I hope you do excuse my absence and I do sincerely hope that I will be able to concentrate more on my website in the upcoming weeks and months; however, as my apprenticeship is nearing its end — and the resulting exams and presentations that accompany its end drawing nearer —, I have my doubts that I will be able to focus on my website as well as I am intending on doing.
The entirety of the Apocalypse of John is now available on my website! Additionally, I have updated the projects page so that it now has two sections, one for current, and still on-going, projects; and one for projects that have been finished. As you may have noticed, I have begun a new project, namely the translation of the Gospel of John — this particular project will (or should, in theory) play out in the same manner as that of the Apocalypse of John; I shall write the translation, publish it here and publish it as a physical book as well. I have yet to write something, but you may already check out the newly created page for the Gospel of John right here.
In addition, I have added really lovely-looking PDF editions of my letters, an example of which can be seen in the image above. It was created by using a really lovely LaTeX package called philokalia (CTAN link), which aims to reproduce the typeface used in the Philokalia manuscripts. Thus, if you wish to print out one of my letters, then I highly recommend you print the PDF edition!
I have finally finished my book! Yes indeed, my book containing my own translation of the Apocalypse of John is finally done; considering the text I translated was rather short, I find that it has taken me longer than I had initially expected — but after a month of working on my translation and the design and typesetting of my book, I can finally proclaim that it has, indeed, been finished.
I have submitted my request to the Books on Demand GmbH (the publisher and printer I am using instead of the one I formerly used) and have already received the ISBN they reserved for me. It is now only a matter of — hopefully — days until they approve my request and the book will officially be published; and it will be a few more weeks still until I finally have the first printed copy of my book in my hands. I do hope, however, that this process will not take longer than the end of August.
A PDF version of the book is not made available on this site, but you may read the book’s HTML edition or look at a preview PDF file of the e-book. For further information, I advise you to visit the webpage regarding my book where, amongst other things, you can also find information on how to acquire your own copy or compile it yourself.
I have finally managed to continue working on my website and have begun implementing a dark mode. It is still being worked on and improved, but it already automatically enables whenever your device‘s theme is set to a dark one. I was able to accomplish this using pure CSS, fortunately, and did not have to resort to my dreaded Javascript just for a dark mode.
I will also begin working on the colourscheme of this website shortly, as I am slowly — but surely — growing tired of seeing the exact same colours every day; perhaps I will even implement a feature that changes the colourscheme randomly or during specific events — if that is indeed possible without any Javascript.
And last but not least, I have begun working on both the Presbyterium but, most importantly, my translation of the Revelation. I have managed to finish chapters 5 and 6 and will continue working on the remaining chapters over the upcoming days and weeks. Once I have finished the web version, I will begin writing an actual book using LaTeX that you will be able to buy! It will contain some more information — such as footnotes — and will have full-colour images. So be sure to come back here in a few months if you‘d like to get yourself a copy of that.
I have, unforunately, been somewhat lazy
regarding the updating of my website, the reasons for which are plentiful. Firstly, as summer has finally made its appearance here and brought its scorching heat and humidity with it, I have become somewhat prone to laziness, as the constant bombardment with UV, IR and other types of radiation from the nuclear reactor millions of kilometres away from Earth creates oft-horrid climatic conditions not only outside but even inside. I appear to be prone to some cardiovascular issues whenever the temperatures reach a certain point and stay there for a prolonged period of time, so that headaches and diziness are not an uncommon occurrence — concentrating on more demanding
subjects can, therefore, be additionally taxing.
Beside these issues, work has been rather busy as of late as well; and due to the fact that we are, once again, required to attend school in person, I have much less free-time now than I did back in mid-May. Once the summer holidays begin — which they will at the beginning of next month —, I will, unfortunately, have even less free-time, as it implies my having to go to work during the day on which I would usually attend school; and as school days are shorter than work days, my free-time will dimish as well.
Nevertheless, I have taken two weeks off work starting at the end of June, during which time I hope to focus my attention towards the improvement of my Greek and this website; whether or not I shall succeed with that endeavour is, however, still unknown — the weather plays a not insignificant role in my success (or failure). Additionally, as my body appears to slowly — but surely — acclimate to the new weather conditions, my apathy has somewhat vanquished as a result and I, therefore, hope to start my work on the Presbyterium some time soon.
I have slowly begun accumulating old books, amongst them being a rather old New Testament from the early 1700s and two other New Testaments from the 19th century. And whilst all three are interesting in their own right, the 18th-century book is, undoubtedly, the most interesting of the bunch; I have already finished thoroughly documenting it in pictures and shall soon begin writing the article about it. I dearly hope that it will arouse the interest of some — as it did mine. Due to the large amount of photos I took — the majority of which I would like to showcase in the article — I have begun working on a small CSS-based image gallery that I can place at the end (or beginning) of the webpage; positioning all the images I took at the left or right side of the page would not work with such a large number of photos.
In addition to what I have already mentioned, my editing environment has been moved from Atom over to VSCode; I also have my eyes set upon a different editor, one which, I find, shows great potential — VSCode with a Vim and SFTP plugin has, however, been more than adequate and is much speedier than Atom.
Regarding my translation of the Revelation, I simply wish to state that it has been somewhat postponed until I am sufficiently acclimated to the weather for me to properly use my brain again. However, I have been using my lunch break — which my boss has made mandatory now — to re-read the Revelation, so that I might have an easier time translating it once I, again, begin my work.
I am sorry that not much has happened for a month, but rest assured that I will return with my usual update schedule shortly.
I have managed to translate two more chapters of the Revelation, namely three and four, and I’m currently working on finishing the fifth. Working on the translation has been much more interesting now that I am past the portion of the text consiting merely of the various letters to the seven churches of Asia.
Other than that, I have continued my reading of the Septuaginta. As I have grown somewhat bored of Gconditions not only outside but even inside. I appear to be prone to some cardiovascular issues whenever the temperatures reach a certain point and stay there for a prolonged period of time, so that headaches and diziness are not an uncommon occurrence — concentrating on more demanding
subjects can, therefore, be additionally taxing.
Beside these issues, work has been rather busy as of late as well; and due to the fact that we are, once again, required to attend school in person, I have much less free-time now than I did back in mid-May. Once the summer holidays begin — which they will at the beginning of next month —, I will, unfortunately, have even less free-time, as it implies my having to go to work during the day on which I would usually attend school; and as school days are shorter than work days, my free-time will dimish as well.
Nevertheless, I have taken two weeks off work starting at the end of June, during which time I hope to focus my attention towards the improvement of my Greek and this website; whether or not I shall succeed with that endeavour is, however, still unknown — the weather plays a not insignificant role in my success (or failure). Additionally, as my body appears to slowly — but surely — acclimate to the new weather conditions, my apathy has somewhat vanquished as a result and I, therefore, hope to start my work on the Presbyterium some time soon.
I have slowly begun accumulating old books, amongst them being a rather old New Testament from the early 1700s and two other New Testaments from the 19th century. And whilst all three are interesting in their own right, the 18th-century book is, undoubtedly, the most interesting of the bunch; I have already finished thoroughly documenting it in pictures and shall soon begin writing the article about it. I dearly hope that it will arouse the interest of some — as it did mine. Due to the large amount of photos I took — the majority of which I would like to showcase in the article — I have begun working on a small CSS-based image gallery that I can place at the end (or beginning) of the webpage; positioning all the images I took at the left or right side of the page would not work with such a large number of photos. enesis, I decided to skip ahead to Exodus and have read roughly twenty pages of that already; it is definitely a much more interesting read than the later chapters of Genesis. Additionally, I have been wondering whether I should start reading the Psalms or some of the prophets — such as Ezekiel — in addition to Exodus; the decision has yet to be reached.
Last — but most definitely not least — is the Presbyterium. The name is the Latinised version of the Greek word πρεσβυτέριον which translates to Council of Elders
; and, indeed, I have chosen its name due to the fact that this page will contain information about old books. I have recently begun collection various old books regarding the language and also written in the language and have decided to create a page with information about them. Once the books arrive — for I have ordered them online — I will be taking photos, gathering as much information as I can about them and publish it in the Presbyterium.
I have now finally finished adding every single chapter of the Revelation of John onto my page and have even finished translating the second one; only twenty-two to go! Unfortunately, the first three chapters are rather drab — they simply consist of letters sent to various churches in Asior Minor — and translating them is not too much fun; it should get much more interesting from chapter four onwards.
In addition to that, I did some work on my website’s CSS, as I have always been somewhat annoyed at the fact that the images displayed within the articles themselves did not have a space underneath them on mobile. It was, therefore, sometimes a tad confusing and you might think that the image caption was, in fact, part of the text. I have now added a padding of 15px underneath, more than enough to mitigate the problem.
I have also added some more links to my Links page and more information onto my About page. The latter is mainly due to the fact that I have finally created a GitHub repository for my website, where anyone might download a copy of my website for offline usage.
Pentecost is waiting at the doorstep and I decided to take a day off and, thus, have a long weekend. I have already been doing a bit of work on my website, mainly adding the Links page and the Updates page you are currently on; and, additionally, I have finally begun my translation of the Revelation. I have successfully translated the first chapter of it and have begun adding the other chapters already. I am hoping to have added all the chapters (i. e. the original Greek, a transliteration and an image) by the end of the day or by tomorrow morning; thereafter, I can easily translate a chapter as I have the time to and am simply required to add the English text onto the page.
I am also thinking of updating this website’s design somewhat, though I am still uncertain whether that which I have in mind is a good idea; I am still running my ideas by a handful of my friends to see what their opinions on them might be. One thing that I have already done, however, is the addition of a Next and Previous button onto each page of my translations; this should make navigation much less cumbersome and improve the reading experience immensly.
In addition to that, I have begun my attempt at reading Homer — and it went as I had expected; though, I must admit, it was not quite as difficult as I had imagined. Indeed, I did not read a whole lot, but careful reading allowed me to understand what the sentences I was reading meant. Nevertheless, I still have much practice ahead of me if I wish to attain fluency in Homer.
Another text I have begun trying to read is the Enchiridion. I would be most happy if I would be able to find a nice reader’s edition of his work, but I have yet to stumble across one. Nevertheless, the grammar and vocabulary are, for the most part, rather simple and reading the next with the help of a dictionary has been somewhat rewarding. I am thinking of writing a translation of this book as well, though I most likely will not begin my work for quite a long while.
I have also been working on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) with tips I received by the helpful owner of Koshka’s Kingdom and have been seeing some tiny impact already. Indeed, as I am using Cloudflare as my DNS, I am able to see how many unique vistors my site gets in a day — and that number has, since the site’s creation, been steadily growing. I am hoping that by the addition of meta tags and titles, I will be able to increase that number further.