Where the Heck Have I Been?
Blog Intrudes on Substack
The world continues to be interesting, during which time I’ve been absent without leave from my Substack. It has been too long since my last update, over a week, but in my defense, I’ve been busy.
The political blog needed a facelift, some updates, and some changes, and all of that came to a head last week when the old site started falling apart before the new one was done, and between dancing around the issues on the old and trying to get the finishing touches on the new, my free time evaporated.
No one wants to pay for licenses on plugins you aren’t using on your new site; just saying.
Moving Day
Saturday, July 13th, proceeded much like so many before it (launch day). We were ready to go live when news broke of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. We do news, politics, and opinion on that site, so we needed to cover it. Our tech support is into politics, and they wanted to get the latest details. Heck, people who don’t do any of those things were on it.
I posted content and frequent updates to both versions of the site, old and new, so the story would be there when we turned the lights on in the “new place” front and center.
Our readers would expect that, and we did it, but there are always issues when you update a site (in my experience), so going live wasn’t the end of the demands on my time.
After a day and a half of fixing up a few back-end things, cleaning, tidying, and so on, we discovered that we were missing two months’ worth of content. We have 218 months of content (18 years and two months), and two months of that didn’t make the trip. Jumped off the digital turnip truck.
Very random.
Some author attribution issues popped up.
We decided to reload the new design on the old platform (where all the data was still sitting) and then move it to a new host—again.
The relaunch went fine, but it took some time, and all that fun stuff we did after the last trip had to be done over. What sort of stuff? Keep in mind this website has been continuously active since the spring of 2006. This is the third remodel, so the fourth iteration, and until now, all have been using the same hosting service.
If you think stuff accumulates in a house that you have lived in for a long time, you should see what happens to a website. If there is a digital version of the show Hoarders, this may have qualified.
Ultimately, we left much of that behind, but you have to look at what it is and decide if it needs to be backed up or dumped.
Tags, images, and all sorts of minor stuff are being cleaned up, but the New and Improved! Website is brighter, cleaner, faster, a lot faster, and more stable. As soon as the balance of the punch list is addressed, like a minor problem with author avatars (for example), I’ll have more time for thoughtful, if not overly snarky, contemplations of the news of the day in this space.
I appreciate your patience.