Four-Year Summary
So there are a number of reasons that I didn't update the blog for the last four years, but there were a few big ones that stopped me where I did left off and not get back to it. Let me break them down.
- Death of a friend One of my closest friends died about a week before my last entry. That did not exactly put me in the best of spaces for a while, particularly because of the circumstances. I have talked some about it on a thread on Reddit, and will probably repost that on here sometime later, so for now I'll not go into it further for now.
- CMS Failure The old blog/CMS software I was previously using, PivotX, had actually long since ended by that point. The final maintenance release was June of 2015. I had been running on that system since the beginning, or rather an older version of it simply titled Pivot, and it was really starting to show issues with that age with various weird bugs on the site. The developers of PivotX had moved on to start a new CMS, called Bolt, and I had actually started the process to convert over to that, but there was some issues with running it on my server with some configuration items that are on by my host being recommended to be off with whatever combinations of frameworks they were using to make Bolt. As I worked on this on and off, there were long periods of time where there was no talk and no update from the Bolt devs, and the future of it was uncertain, and that kind of drove me away from finishing the migration.
- Other Projects For about a year and a half, I was actually doing some major contract project maintaining a high-traffic site. Since I work full time, this means all my spare time was done working on this project and its feature development and maintenance, and so any spare time where I was working on that I had no interest in other programming, either something for this blog or any game development, with what free time I had. Once that contract ended, then I had time to start looking into more stuff. Which led right into...
- 2020 What else to say? We all know how that dumpster fire went. My previous contract had ended around January of 2020, and so I only had a little time to start diving into other things before the world turned upside down. What's worse, early in 2020 I had started some new dieting, and so I was trying to adjust to that and the differences in how I felt because of that as the pandemic began. Then there was a major earthquake in Salt Lake City in the middle of March. A 5.7 scale one for the initial, with major aftershocks of 4 and 4.5 that same day as well as many smaller ones. That earthquake day hectically getting all my team at work ready to be able to work from home and going around and making sure the equipment was set in place to not be damaged from further earthquakes, as that was pretty much the day that they made the sure call that they were building up to as pandemic ramping up of everyone had to be set to work from home that day, building was closed after that. And for the first few weeks or so of that, I felt sick and really tired. Doesn't seem like I had Covid at that time, based on some later antibody tests I took for a study, but between just general earthquake anxiety and maybe something else I caught around then, I was not well for a while after pandemic started.
That's the four major things that happened before. As I started feeling better again last year, and could focus on doing stuff again, I decided to try and work on getting my blog back up and running again. After the experiences with the previous blog going EOL and not getting updates, and the general idea that it's bad to let web software languish because of how often security vulnerabilities come up with old not-updated software, I decided for a different approach. I already didn't have comments turned on, so there was no need for a web-based software to begin with. Instead I'd look into an offline CMS, that would just generate static pages for me to upload to the server. And after trying a few but not giving me the exact flexibility I wanted, I ended up deciding to make one myself that met what I wanted.
So that's what I did. I wrote my own offline CMS, which I just completed this week. Still some features I want to add to it over time, but it's usable now. And I'll go more into that work in another post.
Date posted: 24 February, 2021 Tags: regularspelling personal
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