So, that was quite a while.
The short story is that my web server had a failed hard drive back in… let’s see… according to Amazon, it was at the end of November. The funny thing is it’s kind of an annual tradition for me to review and update my website at the end of the year. Last year wasn’t much different, except the update was all new hardware and no backup.
The no backup part is partially true. I did not have a backup stored of my WordPress database, which held my posts, but I would never leave myself completely lost. I use Live Writer to publish all my posts, and it keeps a local copy of the post on my computer. So all I had to do was repost all my old posts. Piece of cake.
However, I was not in the mood for cake. And I was even less in the mood for the full meal of setting up the web server, installing and configuring WordPress from scratch, and all that extra that goes along with it. At the time, I was kind of figuring myself out again and wasn’t sure I wanted to interact with anyone or put myself out anywhere.
That recovery took about half a year and then it was a matter of getting the motivation to work on the server. Over a month’s time, I slowly got things working and every roadblock made me reconsider putting in the effort. But one thing I’ve learned over my whole life is that personal deadlines are self-imposed. And further, it doesn’t really matter. This is not some fountain of knowledge that the world needs to have available as soon as possible and at all times. So, I worked on it when I felt like it and stopped when it wasn’t fun anymore. I’ve heard runners call this, "Jeffing".
And once the server was up and running, then rebuilding the sites with themes and whatnot, it was a matter of republishing my posts. 1,100+ posts, each loaded up in Live Writer, links and pictures corrected (because linked images disappear on the Internet, you know), and published to the server. That was at least a week of Jeffing.
And now finally, it’s ready to go live. I’m sure I’ll find a few other things that need addressed over the coming days, weeks, and months, but there will be time to fix it.
And what does the future hold for new content? Well, now that we’re in an era where your citizenship could be at risk for your viewpoints, I think the postings may be much tamer than they probably should be. And I haven’t completely recovered from my feelings that I don’t want to really share or expose myself too much, so that will be slow going. But I probably have some drafts I can revisit, and walking the road of my entire blog’s history from beginning to present reminded me of what I used to discuss and what can be followed-up on. There’s always some news to comment on as well…
So, it’s been quite a while – 17 years. What’s an 8 month downtime in all that?
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