Tag: blog

Thoughts on a separate blog

I’ve gone back and forth on this — essentially separating the “personal updates” from “thoughts/opinions on various subjects”.

I almost went for it again, and thought of using Ghost for a new blog.

… but the tradeoff for the effort isn’t worth it, so I decided to continue with this one.

Switching back to hosted WordPress

I tried an experiment of using a self-hosted DigitalOcean-droplet-based copy of this site for a year.

It went well, but I see no advantage to that.

Or rather, there are advantages (freedom w.r.t. plugins) to that, but I didn’t use them, and don’t think I will.

Also, there were some downsides to my self-hosted instance.

DigitalOcean has a XML-RPC limitation with hosted WordPress instances, which makes interaction with them through either (1) the iOS App, or (2) writing apps like Ulysses impossible (though, to its credit, iA Writer relies on a different mechanism of application-specific passwords, and is unaffected by this).

So, it’s back to wordpress.com for me.

Caveat: there’s some problem with “re-pointing the DNS” right now, but I’m hoping that’ll be resolved soon.

Update (2/7/22):

  • All good now, abacusnoir.com directs here now
  • fwiw, DigitalOcean was really good, here’s a snapshot of the droplet before I turned it down:

(a 1vCPU, 1GB droplet is all you need, if you ever go down this road!)

Rediscovering an older self-version

I’ve started a new blog or a new online journal so many times, some private, some public, that I’ve really lost track of all of them. This is mildly complicated because some of them were pseudonymous.

At least on my (now deprecated?) static blog I tried to merge together older content, but I just discovered an older WordPress blog, that can best be described as “explorations in programming“.

At some point, I’m going to try to merge them together (I’m guessing that means exporting-and-importing), but it’s still a bit of a revelation to discover all this stuff I wrote, almost exactly five years ago (!)

Edit (July 11 2019): It turned out to be fairly straightforward to export the old blog and re-import it into this one — the hard part was figuring out what my login/password was, five years ago! — so this blog now goes back to 2014!