Tag: Site News

Migrating to a New Website

I’ve been meaning to get back to regular blogging for a while, but that effort was hampered by the fact that I’ve grown sick of WordPress. At the same time, I don’t want to lose my archive of posts. I finally found a solution for migrating 10 years worth of posts (8,052 posts in total) to a platform I like. I’ve spent the last few days working on it. It’s still a work in progress but my new site is here. It’s currently running on a test server. I wrote up a slightly more detailed explanation of the move. I explain in more detail in that post, but a slightly janky archive of the posts on this site are on the new site and accessible here.

The real purpose of this post is to let the one or two of you out there subscribed to my RSS feed know about the move. The new RSS feed is here.

I will keep this server running for a while as I finish the new site. However, I intend to shut this server down and redirect the URL to the new site within a month or so if everything goes according to plan.

Year Plus Check-In

I was updating my server and realized that it’s been a little over a year since I posted any content. Do I feel bad? Not at all. As I’ve always said, this blog is more for me than you. But I thought that I’d give a little update for the two people that added my blog to their RSS reader and forgot to remove it.

My biggest focus for the last year has been me. By that I mean I’ve been getting even more into physical fitness. I completed the first phase of my home gym project this year. It went from a small section in my unfinished utility room to a significantly larger section of that room. I have a complete set of kettlebells, which means I have pairs of every weight from 16 kg to 48 kg in 4 kg increments. I also bough a set of PowerBlock Elite EXP adjustable dumbbells (a great opportunity to abuse that free shipping Amazon Prime gives). Horse mats are the typical go-to for flooring options for home gyms, but I opted for Amorim sports flooring. It’s not a squishy as horse mats and doesn’t have the same room clearing stench when you first get them. You may notice no mention of a barbell and accompanying weights. Right now I’m getting the results I want from kettlebells. There’s also not enough space in my utility room for a power rack and barbell setup. When I get around to building a shed, I plan to have a space in it set aside for a barbell setup. Finally, I bought an elliptical, but that’s more for the wife than me. I used it when the weather isn’t conducive to walking or rucking.

I was running Pavel’s Rite of Passage kettlebell program towards the end of 2022 and through much of 2023. However, I changed programs when I finished my kettlebell set because I had doubles of every weight and wanted to take advantage of them (Rite of Passage is an excellent program and I highly recommend it). I ran Geoff Neupert’s Dry Fighting Weight program since it combines two of my favorite exercises: clean and presses and front squats. The only lift that was missing from my top three were snatches. Low and behold he released his new Maximorum program this year, which uses double clean and presses, double front squats, and one arm snatches. I’m beginning that program this afternoon.

On other fronts, I haven’t relapsed on social media. I haven’t logged into Facebook or Twitter (or X as it’s not called) for almost three years now. I still use Matrix and Signal, but neither of them are designed to suck as much time from your life as possible so I actually enjoy popping on and off of them. My wife and I (which is to say mostly my wife) expanded our garden. We have nine raised beds and a few small plots used for odds and ends.

If the two of you who forgot to remove my blog from your RSS read are still reading, I plan to add more content in the coming months. Expect to see a few articles related to physical fitness. I will likely write some posts related to guns since that is the reason I started this blog. Don’t expect to see any content related to the upcoming election since I don’t care about rigged games played by geriatrics.

Server Migration Complete

When I first started self-hosting my blog, I was using a 2010 MacMini running Mac OS X 10.6. When Apple released 10.7, it did away with the server edition and instead replaced it with an app that didn’t work. That forced me to migrate my blog to Linux. I used Ubuntu Server LTS and it worked very well. However, I didn’t utilize any automation so whenever I wanted to do maintenance on or rebuild my server, I had to do so manually. This meant that maintenance didn’t get done when life got too busy. Over the last year I’ve been slowly migrating my manually built infrastructure to fully automated builds using Ansible. While I have a number of grievances with Ansible (YAML is an awful automation language and whoever decided to use it should be crucified), it is the least awful automation system that I’ve tested.

As with any major project I started with the easy things. First I automated building my DHCP and DNS servers. Then I moved on to automating the building of my VPN, NAS, and so on. I finally got around to writing an Ansible playbook to build this blog.

Previously I followed conventional wisdom that servers should be run on long-term support distributions. But I started to question whether that wisdom was appropriate for what I do. Whenever I had to upgrade the server running this blog from one Ubuntu LTS to another, the upgrade itself went well. But I always ended up having to manually fix a number of things that broke due to the significance of the changes that occurred between the two LTS releases. Those breakages often weren’t trivial to fix. They would eat up a lot of my time. So I started to experiment with more bleeding edge distros. I settled on Fedora Server since I already run Fedora on my laptop and have become familiar with it. Major version upgrades haven’t resulted in major breakages. When something does break, it usually takes a minute or two for me to fix.

So this blog is now running on Fedora Server 34. And I can rebuild it by issuing a single command.

I’m guessing there will still be a few issues that need to be resolved. I changed quite a bit on the back end so I’m expecting a few breakages here and there and I’m sure I’ll have to make a few performance tweaks (not that you’ll likely notice issues regarding performance since my Internet connection sucks). But the site largely appears functional.

New Theme

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you. I changed the theme for the first time, at least that I can recall, since I started this blog. The old theme hadn’t been updated in a long time and a recent plugin update caused a catastrophic error to occur in the administration interface (why a theme that is only used by the user facing part of the site causes errors on the administration facing part of the site is something I can only attribute to WordPress being, well, WordPress).

I switched the theme over to the least offensive one I could find on short notice. I may change it again if I find something I like better. However, it’s tough finding a theme that doesn’t want to take up a third of the top of the page with a useless image, only show summaries of posts on the main page (I want the complete contents of each post to show on the main page to save you pointless clicking), or otherwise waste screen real estate and introduce unnecessary clicking. This blog is predominantly text and most themes seem geared towards multimedia (which is why I stuck to my old theme for so long). Maybe my preference in simple themes shows that I’m an old curmudgeon when it comes to blogging.

Ten Years

It’s hard to believe that I started my blog almost 10 years ago (it came online January of 2009). In that time I’ve written 7,878 posts on a lot of different topics.

Looking back at my decade of blogging I can say that it has been a good use of time. Writing, like all other activities, is improved with practice and regularly blogging gives a lot of writing practice. Moreover, writing about topics requires more thinking than one might otherwise do. It’s also interesting for me to look back at how my interests and beliefs have changed over the last decade.

While I find that blogging has been greatly beneficial to me it has also be time consuming. In order to focus on other projects, I’m planning to do quite a bit less blogging in the coming years. I don’t plan to stop completely but I can’t keep up this pace while also keeping up with everything else. You’ll see new content here in 2019 but not as much. When the other projects I’m focusing on are further along, I’ll post about them here.

Anyways, here’s another the end of 2018 and the beginning of 2019. Hopefully the new year ends up being as absurd as the last year (I would hate to be bored in 2019).