Category: Ramblings

I spent a month building out the framework for my website. My plan was to simplify and downsize my footprint. That ended up not working out for me and I ended up adapting my design into a WordPress theme, which in and of itself is a slight pain. My plan was to shed the content management, but it ended up being too cumbersome to update. And then I tried forcing some of the static posts into Gutenberg-esque version. And then I tried to stuff the proverbial square peg into a round hole by posting as custom HTML blocks.

Why am I telling you this, you might be asking? I’m not. Just thinking out loud and collecting my thoughts. I spent most of the past year on a self-hosted solution in the cloud, but that ended up not working for me so I’ve moved back to a straight webhosting provider. I’m trying to get back into the groove before CON season begins again in the post-COVID world.

I have a lot of focus issues, so simplifying should help, hopefully. The hosting is a bit slow, but it was cheap and I’ve got the cache acceleration enabled now, so CloudFlare CDN, do your thing!

I’m getting back to my Emperor Zarkon Quintessence Suite from Voltron: Legendary Defender. I should be posting updates soon. **Should**

Yet another redeployment of my website. My hosting account with InMotion expired last month and the pricing felt steep for what I needed, so I started searching for a new place to host. I looked at:

• Google Cloud Platform
• Bootstrap Studio Hostiing
• AWS Lambda and EC2 Services

GCP felt powerful but like a lot of Google products felt clunky and not that intuitive to use. I still have a credit on my account so I’m still playing around with it. I’m using G Suite for mail hosting and I like it so far, but I could do without a monthly subscription fee.

I purchased the Bootstrap Studio editing software, which is actually kinda neat to use but there’s a steep learning curve, especially for someone who hasn’t messed around with web design in almost 20 years. A lot has changed. There are things I like and dislike about the platform, but it has the features I need. To further complicate things, I decided that I wanted something more interactive, and easier to insert updates but didn’t want the hassle of managing a database for such a small amount of data. So I started building a Bootstrap-based theme for Get Simple CMS, which stores its data in XML flat files.

I started looking at AWS because the services I need are essentially free for the next year. I can spend some time re-familiarizing myself with web hosting. I’ve been an IT Professional pretty much my entire adult life. The free/discounted services gives me the opportunity to setup micro instances in AWS so I can play around with systems and setup a sandbox, in case I want to look at getting my Red Hat certification back. Luckily, this all ties into my professional career, so why not, eh?

Anyway, thanks for visiting and hopefully, I’ll stay on top of posting updates here and on my social media accounts again.