New Mac Day, and I practice what I preach.
I wouldn’t count on it, since it’s Boston, but the #4Nations championship game crowd should totally belt out “O, Canada” and show up the snooty Montrealans.
January has been short story/novella month for me. I started on novels, first with Shibumi, then Tom Wood’s latest Victor tome, Firefight. But since then it’s been:
Eleven Numbers: A Short Story – Lee Child
“Archangel” – Frederick Gero Heimbach
New Kid in Town: A Jack Reacher Story – Andrew Child
Orders of Magnitude – Yuval Kordov
All have been very entertaining. Frederick’s and Yuval’s respective stories are spectacular.
Regularly scheduled reading will now resume as I turn back to Jack London’s White Fang.
I’ve got our youngest reading the Junior Classic edition, and I’m reading along, but with the original big-boys-and-girls edition. đź“š
I failed to mention it last week when we published, but there is a new episode of The Empowered Parent Podcast out. Our good friend Will Standfest was in town, and we had a chat about mid-school year check-ins, seeing if our kids’ educational needs are being met and what recalibrations might need to be made if any.
I thought it was pretty entertaining. Took me back to the Mack Bolan novels my grandfather used to share with me. đź“š
First novel read in 2025 is Trevanian’s Shibumi.
If I’m being totally honest, I wasn’t at all impressed. đź“š
First king cake order for 2025 placed with Manny Randazzo’s King Cakes, arriving the day after Epiphany.
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”
Among my many failings as a parent, the college kid having never seen this Christmas classic is one we are remedying now.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know what I said. So how is it that the personal blog is back on WordPress and off of Micro.blog?
First, it’s all Jack Baty’s fault. Okay, not really, but given Jack’s preponderance for changing blogging platforms every other week and posting about it on Mastodon, he certainly is responsible for planting a seed. His posts at least made me think about things beyond a “the grass is always greener in the other pasture” perspective.
Really the reason is three-fold:
- I don’t really use the social aspects of Micro.blog, and given that, it doesn’t make much sense to use it as my personal blog when I can do the same thing on WordPress for less money.
- And yes, another reason is financial: I already run the old blogs on Dreamhost, as well as the on-hiatus Big Fat Geek Podcast site, along with the site for a new endeavor, and all the email thereof, on a grandfathered-in plan, so it just makes sense to save the cost of a Micro.blog subscription and move back.
- Finally, I realized I never really felt comfortable within the Micro.blog ecosystem. Maybe it was just the long-term familiarity with WordPress, but there’s something to be said for that familiarity. I never felt Manton was out of reach on support issues, and I enjoyed two great themes by Matt Langford. The best way to describe it is Micro.blog felt like wearing Sunday best, and WordPress is more like a really comfortable t-shirt and jeans, and I’m a t-shirt and jeans guy.
I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Micro.blog as a blogging platform, especially for newbies, or for spinning up a new blog. It just ultimately wasn’t for me with where I’m at, having been blogging at Retrophisch for over 20 years, so it was time to move on.
Speaking of the move back, major thanks to the Dreamhost Support staff. While it was easy-peasy to spin up WordPress on a new site in the Dreamhost panel, I was running in to issues when attempting to use the Copy Site function. Given that I hadn’t blogged all that much since I made the pronouncement that I was sticking with Micro.blog, I just wanted to copy retrophisch.com over to retrophisch.net, then I would manually move the rest. I reached out to Dreamhost Support, and not only did they go ahead and copy everything over for me, they updated all the URLs within WordPress from retrophisch.com to retrophisch.net.
I also decided to lean in to the “retro” part of my online moniker, and the fonts currently being used for content are IBM Plex Mono for body text, and Inconsolata for headings and the like. I’m loving the old-school look.