I’ve moved this site from the host where it’s been for years to a, hopefully, more reliable and secure host.
I, in the process, managed to mess up the DNS entries, so this site may not have been responsive in the last 24 hours at times.
Hopefully, we’re clear of changes now, and I can focus on making posts.
New Year – New Post
Just a quick post to start the new year.
I made some updates to the bio/about page on this site, removed the twitter link there, as I am not actively posting to Twitter at this point. I am on Mastadon here.
New hosting setup
This post is mainly a test of some new hosting that was put in place this week to make sure that things are still configured and working correctly. Still WordPress, these updates were mainly due to my hosting provider phasing out some of the gear that I was hosted on. I continue to want to migrate to some kind of static publishing system.
It’s been a very busy year for me, with a lot of work travel. I’m hoping to post more here this Fall as my work schedule gets a bit more manageable.
Some Upgrades and Updates
I made some backend changes to my WordPress config. It seems to make the load time on this site a bit better.
It turned out that the caching setup I was using was, in effect, not caching. Go me. This should just be a temporary change, as I started migrating this whole site over to a static page generator which will host its pages off of an Amazon bucket.
I also updated the about page with my most recent situations and information.
This Old Blog
I’ve had some time on my hands the last few weeks, as I’m currently between jobs. It’s been pretty great to have some time off. I was working at Turner for 16 years, spanning four different properties, and a myriad of projects. I’ve really enjoyed spending time with my family, and focusing on what’s important rather than immediate. I’m at the very beginning of my job search, and will likely post more about that here soon, as I need to do some work on my CV first. Turner is a very different place than the one where I started in 2003.
One project that I’ve put off for a very long time is moving this blog to more reliable and modern hosting. Additionally, I have wanted to finally move all the entries into a single CMS. With the 22nd anniversary of this site looming in a couple of weeks, now seemed as good a time as any to try and get this stuff squared away. The site has been on the current host since 2010, and with the advent of cloud hosting, I can actually reduce my cost and greatly improve the speed of the site, which is really terrible at the moment.
Previously, most of the entries that were before March 2000, when I switched the site over to Blogger/Radio Userland as a backend, were sitting in either a flat file, or on this server, which is still somehow up and running.
Over the last two weeks, I have manually been bringing those older entries over to this existing server. This will allow me to export everything from WordPress as a single set of combined entries. Unfortunately, there were a few hundred entries, and so it took quite a while.
Happily, I just finished this task. It meant having to read what the me from 20 years ago was thinking about, which was dreadful at times. It was also cathartic. I’m quite embarrassed by what younger me thought and the quality of my writing in the earliest entries was atrocious. Having said that, this won’t keep me from leaving these entries intact. I think it’s honest to leave them as is.
This migration poses some issues that still need to be resolved. For instance, most of the links in the very old posts are either dead, or resolve to domain squatters, or even to porn sites. I need to figure out a strategy.
In a similar vein, I would love for my old inbound links to all resolve to the right place, but I cannot think of a way to make sure that this will be the case in a new static generator CMS. With this entry, there will be a total of 2600 posts, so doing something manual is not really a good option. I may have to punt on that at this point.
Next up is making a version of the site with some cloud hosting, and a static CMS. This will be the part that I will enjoy the most, I am sure.