Tag: site

There and Back Again: A Bloggit’s Tale

iPad with Magic Keyboard
Photo by Ernest Ojeh on Unsplash

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

On friction, and ownership

Some time ago, I was going back and forth on my choice of blogging platform. (Totally a #FirstWorldProblem.) WordPress was working fine, but felt heavy, which to be fair, it has become in some ways, at least for my own use. Not that that should detract from its versatility as a content management system, but it felt like a little too much for a personal blog.

Photo of MacBook Pro in a gray room, by Blake Connally on Unsplash

Retrophisch.net was living here on Micro.blog, and while I was treating this as my main blog, it was essentially being mirrored over at Retrophisch.com, run by the aforementioned WordPress. Mid-May, I stopped doing that, committing myself to Micro.blog going forward.

Well, kinda. More on that in just a moment.

I have a future plan, months down the road, for retrophisch.com as a professional site. More on that when those plans come to fruition. I think in the mean time it may become just a landing page or a one-page personal site, a la what you find at About.me and other such sites/services.

I flirted briefly with moving Retrophisch.net to Blot.im. I love the simplicity of text files and images synced from a Dropbox folder. This was directly related to my earlier post about decoupling the domain from Micro.blog. And by the time you’re reading this, the domain should be reconnected, because I’m staying put.

In the end, moving from Micro.blog to Blot was simply trading one kind of friction for another, and the tradeoffs ultimately weren’t worth it to me. There were some minor things design-wise I wanted to do, and moving from the Kiko theme to Matt Langford’s Tiny Theme for Micro.blog allowed me to do those in short order. Matt is very active with the theme’s development, and has made all sorts of customizations possible, so I’m set for the road ahead.

Own your own domain, own your own space

I have long been an advocate for this concept: have your own domain name, and own your own space on the Internet. Own your own email. Stake out a homestead. Sure, you can use other services—you can see the ones I’m on at the bottom of each page on this site—but ultimately, everything is on your home base. Those in the know call this POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere.

So yes, micro posts and photos you may see here you may also see on my Twitter or Instagram feeds, but they were here first, and even if those services were extinguished tomorrow, my posts remain here.

This is, after all, a personal blog, my little corner of the Internet. And thanks to the work Manton has done with Micro.blog, it’s a lot like blogging was in the early days, only without the hassle of hand-coding the HTML & CSS yourself (unless you feel like tweaking things). So my posts can just be posts, without a title, should I feel like they don’t warrant one, because that’s how it was back in the hand-coding days. (The dates for each post contain a permalink for the post.)

There’s still a lot of work to do. Lots of clean-up from imports I never did, and this is ongoing as time allows, what with work and family. But the place has been given a new paint job and tidied up a bit, so we can keep cleaning up the basement. 😃

Update, 14 August 2024: I’m now making use of Matt’s new theme, Sumo. It’s rather opinionated, and I love it.

According to the calendar, retrophisch.com is now old enough to legally drink.

Actually, I Did Move

black and silver laptop computer on table
Photo by Clément Hélardot on Unsplash

So remember when I said a few months ago that I was staying put? Yeah, not so much.

As it turns out, I already had at my disposal a blogging platform that fit all the needs I was looking for—micro posts easily mixed with longer blog posts—and that I was already paying for: Micro.blog. I was one of the Kickstarter backers of Manton Reece’s project back in 2017, and have been pretty much cross-posting my social media (mainly Twitter) musings to it ever since it launched. When my Kickstarter-reward plan expired, it was a no-brainer for me to keep my subscription going. The platform has steadily improved, and for where I am in my blogging life right now, it checks all the boxes I need it to.

So if you only follow me here, you need to point your browser or RSS reader to Retrophisch.net. And thanks for sticking around here all these years!

Staying put

MacBook Pro on top of brown table
Photo by Kari Shea on Unsplash

So my experimentation with Ghost as a new blogging platform is, for now at least, dead. My conclusion: I didn’t want to be stuck running the behind-the-scenes of another blogging platform, which is what I was doing with my own installation of Ghost on DigitalOcean. And yet I didn’t want to pony up for a Ghost Pro installation while I would still be paying for my existing setup, where I have more than just this blog and email.

So for now, staying put with WordPress on Dreamhost. My installation is pretty lean as it is, and I’m used to it. I do plan to migrate from the .com to the .net, because it just fits with the online moniker.

If you are new to blogging, however, and are looking for a fast, easy to use, and worry-free platform, I would recommend giving Ghost a look. Should my needs change in the future where I think they would best be served by moving to Ghost Pro, that is definitely the direction I would move.

One positive on moving to a new domain, and a new blogging platform, is cleaning up old posts, and deleting ones where the content therein is no longer online.

So long, comments

Occasionally, those follow-a-link-from-a-link-from-a-link blog trains land you in a thought pattern that ends up in a situation of “Why didn’t I think of this sooner?” And so I have arrived at disabling all comments on the blog. Jon Saddington’s post convinced me to take the plunge, and I even used the plug-in he suggested. Took less than three minutes. Easy.

Why do this? I don’t expect a lot of comments, for one. I don’t post often enough for conversations to happen, unlike my friend Michael’s blog. Second, I don’t need another time-wasting distraction that is approving or not approving comments, or going through the ones marked as spam looking for false positives. If there is a need for reader interaction to take place, they can hit me up on any of the major social platforms, or use the contact form linked at the top of the page. Finally, this blog should be about me writing what I want to write, not writing what I think people want me to write. Disabling comments helps that focus to happen.

And now I have one less thing to worry about.

Hello, again, early 2019 edition

Retrophisch.com lives again. I have wandered aimlessly in the wilds of the Internet for far too long. It was finally time to own up to one of my mantras regarding one’s online presence: own your own domain, own your own content.

History, and the way forward

When last we left this site, I had eschewed WordPress for Tumblr. Given one of the constants of life is change, it was only a matter of time before WordPress evolved to the point where I would make the leap. And it was so easy. I wonder why I took so long to do this. (Oh, right, life with three boys, and being hockey dad, Cub Scout dad, swim dad, golf dad…)

I have had a Dreamhost account for a few years. The only real use it had been seeing was serving up email for my oldest, on one of the domains I registered for him a decade or so prior. When the server this blog and its predecessor had been living on suffered a catastrophic hardware failure, it was time to make the move to Dreamhost full time and relaunch. So here we are.

WordPress installation on Dreamhost was a snap with their One-Click Install. Importing my Movable Type archive went seamlessly. Well, seamlessly after I figured out I needed to install and turn on Markdown plugins for some of its and the Tumblr archive’s posts to look as they should. Said Tumblr archive followed soon after. My Tumblr site remains up, so long as Tumblr survives as a corporate entity. Should that fail at some point, the posts live on here. Which is the whole point: owning my own content.

Years ago, Michael Hyatt blogged how he looked at his online presence as revolving around his blog/site. That was home base. Everything else—Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, what have you—were simply outposts. They were never to be one’s only online presence. While this resonated with me, having had an online presence before any of these companies came into existence, I stumbled in hewing to it. Nevertheless, thanks to catastrophic hardware failures, corporate buyouts, and creepy corporate policies, I began anew to prepare myself to giving up one or more of those entities should I feel the need arise.

Manton Reece reiterated, repeatedly, that which Hyatt promoted, and I internalized: own your own content. Manton left Twitter in 2012, but didn’t stop with posting tweets. He just did so on his own blog, in the form of snippets, or micro posts. This eventually led him to launch Micro.blog on Kickstarter two years ago. I backed this project, and was among the hundreds of original tenants of the Micro.blog ecosystem. I mainly set it up as the own-my-own-content side of my social media. You’d see these same posts on Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, but they lived on Micro.blog first. This became my default online presence.

Yet there was still a sense of unease behind it. Yes, it was a service I was paying for. I was the customer, not some corporation paying Manton for all my info so they could sell ads to me. You know, exactly what Twitter and Facebook do. But it still felt like another layer to deal with. It was better than what I was doing before, and I continue to enjoy the community aspects of Micro.blog, but it didn’t feel like home.

Now those posts will reside here. I ran into an issue importing my Micro.blog feed, and I’m working with Manton to resolve it. Those will cross-post to Micro.blog, and thus to Twitter (and Mastodon, for what it’s worth).

There’s still a lot of cleanup to do on the older posts. I’ve gotten through 2002 as of this post going up, which means there’s a long way to go, but it’s worth it to me.

I do not plan to delete old posts. Some of these I’ve read and winced. My thinking has changed on some issues in more than a decade since these old posts were published. With others, maybe I could have been nicer and less sarcastic. (Hey, I said maybe.) But they are what they were at that time in my life.

Much thanks is due to Webmistress and CSS master Raena for assistance in getting things looking just the way I wanted, and to Michael for bits of advice on WordPress, Dreamhost, and importing content.

Why do all this?

Because I can. Because I want to. Because I determined I am going to own my online presence and not outsource it to others. You may not feel this way. That’s cool. But this is the way I want it for me.

Own your own domain. Own your own email. Own your own content.

So what’s next?

A few years ago, when I was throwing around the idea for a new logo, a new tagline appeared in my mind: Navigating the waters of faith, family, and fiction. While that isn’t displayed overtly on the side, it is embedded in the code. So those areas will be my focus, along with the tech and nerdery I’ve long been involved with.

In the latter vein, I already have a draft about Mac portables going, based upon some recent experience, recent news, and recent blog posts by others.

I hope you stick around!

“Greetings, people. Greetings.”

To quote one George Constanza:

“Greetings, people. Greetings. Greetings and salutations. What a beautiful day for a ball game. Let’s play two!”

And what a beautiful day for a new blog launch. Why? The full explanation is at the old blog; I won’t take up space rehashing it all here.

More to come here, and soon…

Retrophisch is dead. Long live Retrophisch.

For more than a year I’ve been thinking about redesigning the blog. I know, I know, I haven’t really blogged that much of late, but still, I’ve been giving it some thought.
Given that this is a not-for-profit venture that’s really more for me than anyone else–though I truly appreciate your patronage–I could not justify paying someone to do the redesign for me, though I have numerous friends I would love to have do it for me.
The redesign thought process had me examine my blogging platform as well. I’ve been with Movable Type for quite a while, nearly a decade. This blog is currently on version 4.2 of the software, with 5.1 on the cusp of release. Were I to stay with Movable Type, it would behoove me to upgrade, and take on the learning curve of the changes made with version 5.
WordPress, of course, is the hot ticket in the blogging world right now, and has an impressive and extensive theme ecosystem, making a redesign a theoretically simpler affair. My friend Tom has been using Tumblr for two years, and has been pretty happy with it, the service’s massive outage five months ago notwithstanding.
It was precisely Tumblr’s outage, and my Type A-control freak personality, which had me pushing Tumblr and similar service Posterous to the bottom of my choices.
Then there was the decision of export/import. Did I want to take nine years worth of Movable Type blog posts and import them into a new blogging system?
Conveniently, I had another domain name I could use. Since assuming the Retrophisch moniker, I’ve had the .net and .org domains pointing to the .com. About two years ago, I had the bright idea to seek out a shortened domain, one ending in .ch. This necessitated a visit to the Swiss registrar SWITCH, as at the time no U.S.-based registrar was offering Swiss domain purchases. In a matter of minutes, retrophis.ch was mine. It, too, went up as a redirect to the original retrophisch.com.
Now, I find myself with a domain different enough, yet still the same, I could simply “flip the switch” with: start over, with no importing. The old blog will reside as it always has, and go into archival mode.
So one part of the decision-making process was done. Now, back to the question of the engine, the content management system, or CMS, as it’s called. I ended up leaning toward Posterous, then Control-Freak Me decided on WordPress.
Only it was not to be: WordPress’ “famous five-minute install” went off without a hitch, but I kept running into a glitch with the setup. While Control-Freak Me was running this down, I-Just-Want-To-Post-Content Me was getting really annoyed, and went off exploring other options yet again.
Finally, I decided to move to Tumblr. Yes, there is a chance the service will go down again. Yet there’s just as much of a chance of a flash flood taking out my friend Jim’s server where this site resides. Stuff happens.
So from this moment forward, new stuff will be there, at Retrophis.ch. Point your browsers, and feed readers if that’s how you roll, there. This joint’s being boxed up and rolled off into the giant Internet storage warehouse.
Thanks for stopping by. Hope to see you over at the new digs.