Ruining It For Everyone Else Since 2004
Hello!
I’ve been having fun for the last week trying to get switched over, but after constant pushing and research (and remembering to turn selinux off the fuck) I finally have website(s) again! I still have quite a bit of tweaking to do, but for the most part it can all be done at a leisurely pace. I’m just glad I got it figured out…
Just in time to go back to work…
My plans for time off might have to be put on hold, we have more and more people at work dropping out. Not from COVID 19 thankfully, but due to colds or wanting to social distance. One of my co-workers is taking a couple weeks off as of today to protect his family. I’m going to be playing it by ear, but this is going to have a bit of an impact on my schedule, and my time off might be cancelled unless I either become ill, or conditions become hazardous enough for me to get a doctor’s note.
Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because this might have to delay the website move until this shit gets sorted. I want to make sure I have a decent amount of time set aside to migrate things accordingly without having to rush on a work night. I’ll be installing the wiki as well as setting up the email server, which looks straight forward on paper but with Linux you never know. :trollface: I’ve already read a few tutorials for other things that lacked certain details.
I’m also looking into getting a new gaming laptop. My brother has finally entered the workforce and obviously needs to have a laptop with swagger, so I’ll be selling him mine and giving myself an upgraded laptop. I’m still researching what I want to go with. Probably ROG, nothing lower than a GTX 1070, and I also need to make sure it has at least three drive bays like my current portable rig. I haven’t decided if I’ll stay with Skylake or go with a newer generation, Ryzen on the laptop front isn’t quite there yet for me unfortunately… so for now I’ll have to continue using Intel and NVidia on the laptop side while I’m pure red on the desktop side. Ah well, on the brightside having two different chipsets and graphics cards gives me something to write about from both sides of the hardware rainbow.
Speaking of hardware; has anyone seen the new controller for the PS5? They’re no longer calling it a Dualshock, but rather a DualSense controller. The design looks like the zombie corpse of Steve Jobs came back from the dead and flogged 50% of the design. I’m not saying it’s a bad controller, for all I know it is probably just as good as any of Sony’s previous lineup if not more so, but that design looks quite… plain.
On April 18th I will be taking this website, as well as any other website running on this server down to prepare for moving over to Digital Ocean. There will most likely be some downtime while transferring my domain name as well as pointing everything at the right addresses. I’m planning to take vacation from work that week, so I should have plenty of time to get things sorted out. I’ve tried setting up what I can, but I’m going to need it all pointing to a domain to continue any further. This will give me more than enough time to get things together, and enough time for enough people to see what’s going on.
All your asses have been warned, yo.
Update
I’m hoping to achieve moving things over in May.
I’m having issues getting a plugin called BuddyPress to work properly; it installs without any errors, but if I try to load the activity page, or any page that comes with BuddyPress it doesn’t load properly. It might be an issue with javascripting according to a couple places I’ve read. Sadly I’ll have to shelve this for another day.
On the bright side I did get the last of the personal blogs transferred over tonight. I’m thinking of trying to animate some more stuff tomorrow, on another project that feels like it’s taking an eternity and a half…. it’ll be worth it though when I finally release it one of these months.
I’ve been experimenting with ways to deploy WordPress websites, and I haven’t been having a good time. I’m better off just using the export/import functions designed for WordPress and putting the plugins/themes back in manually. I successfully transferred over my brother’s blog and let him take care of the rest of it, and now I’m moving my large ass database over. It’s been importing my images for about an hour now. I’ll just let it do its thing over night and check back on it in the morning.
I had some early beta testers check out one of the websites over at the new host, and much like I experienced the load speed is amazeballs even on systems with ancient architectures. If my brain is feeling up to it tomorrow after 8 hours of public abuse I might tear back into things.
I got a shiny new wordpress install on my new droplet server! I had to backtrack through my dependencies a little today, but I managed to get WordPress to run among other resources. Oddly enough, the latest PHP version on the main repo for CentOS 7 is 5.2 (the current one is 7.4). I’m actually surprised that dependency is THAT out of date! Then again CentOS is more geared towards business and stability, which means unlike other Linux distros like Mint or Ubuntu it has to run on an older kernel and other dependencies unless the owner has reason to tinker with it themselves. If I were maintaining the repo it would at least be in the later 6 series for security reasons.
Tomorrow I’ll look into importing at least one existing WordPress install just to see how it goes. If all goes well I’ll add the other installs over, and if not I have my own ways of solving the problem. :zorak: Once this is all said and done I think visitors will like the load times, at least until they start reading the damned place. :rick:
Last August I began having issues with my website provider Bluehost, when they “upgraded” my service by taking away my ability to open a process manager, and also made it impossible for me to run a murmur server due to their ridiculously low file descriptor count. In the old days I could just submit a support ticket to get a config changed, or open certain server ports for example. Now you have to either sit down and chat with them on the phone, or have an online chat with them. I’ve complained to them numerous times about my issues with no success, in fact at one point they made it even worse for me by changing my PHP version from 7.2 to 5.0, which is the equivalent of ordering a cheeseburger at a restaurant and instead having a toaster served to you on a platter with maple syrup and a hobo’s flaming scarf. What part of “Follow this wiki link and increase my file descriptors” even remotely translates into “Downgrade my PHP version plz”? PHP and Murmur don’t even have anything to do with each other!
They also managed to lock me out of FTP. Two tech support sessions and about a month later I eventually get my FTP access back… However I’m still at square one. I’ve been telling them from the beginning that I needed my file descriptors increased in order to run murmur, and I even linked instructions to them on a wiki page! After about another month I got word back basically stating what I already knew; My old server they migrated me from had a larger file descriptor count, and since I’m on shared hosting I would most likely have to pay for a dedicated server to do what I basically did before… They were going to look into things further, and said they would get back in contact with me sometime after thanksgiving… I still haven’t heard from them, at this point I decided take a friend’s advice and just go to Digital Ocean.
Now that the holidays are over and I’ve had a chance to breathe I’m proceeding with my server migration plan. I’m copying my files off of bluehost and getting ready to copy website databases, email addresses and the whole shebang to prepare for the move. I have until July to get things switched over, so while I’m not in too big of a hurry I do want to use the time to be through. It will give me plenty of time to test things properly before pulling the plug on bluehost.
It’s a shame that I have to do this after almost a decade :zorak: , but the service I got was anything but impressive. One thing I’m noticing across businesses is the lack of quality in staffing, or rather just lack of staffing in general. I wouldn’t be surprised if bluehost got rid of a bunch of their staff and only hired and trained people just enough to work with WordPress installs. As a result my questions about my Murmur server alluded them… I’ve seen a lot of companies try to take Wal-Mart’s leading business examples beyond the retail front, and it looks like Bluehost Wal-Marted their quality.
I’ve taken the liberty of adding a couple galleries, and plan to add a couple more down the road depending on what I want to showcase. But if you want to see them I’ve added a new drop down menu that’s easy to access on desktop browsers, and also a couple links at the bottom of the page for those on mobile. I’ll look further into rearranging at a later date, but so far I really like this plugin. It was pretty easy to setup and seems to deliver some nice results, looks quite nice on my tablet too.
I figured a gallery would be nice, and its something I’ve been contemplating for awhile. I have a feeling it’ll be awhile before I can properly finish a video, and I figured it would be nice to display pictures from projects and other strange ideas.
Any feedback would be appreciated.
If anyone reading this blog is familiar at all with self hosted WordPress sites they may know of a plugin called Jetpack provided by WordPress themselves. You connect your blog to WordPress.com which can be quite handy for more than a few items, such as spam protection, the option to syndicate your posts to social media websites the moment you make your blog post, and more where that came from. One thing they’ve been pushing with the newest version of WordPress is the new Gutenberg post editor, and they sent me an email to get me hyped about an all new feature that would totally be worth switching to Gutenberg for… FUCKING GIFS!!
Animated images — also known as GIFs — have become one of the hottest social media tools.
Whoa, you mean to tell me that GIFS… a picture format that was invented around the time I came into being…. is now a hot young social media tool? That’s oddly appropriate since most people in my age group at work happen to be tools on social media!
They tell a story, add humor and emotion, and can create a lasting impression on millions of readers.
The newest version of Jetpack adds a GIF block for the new editor, putting the world’s largest GIF library at your fingertips.
Perhaps I’ll give Gutenberg another shot at some point just to see the gif selection sometime in the not too distant future, if I’m bored enough…
Why say something with words when you can say it with a dancing turtle?
Wait, they taught Mitch McConnell how to dance? :morty: :rick:
In a recent update to WordPress (starting with 5.0 IIRC) they changed the text editor style to a new version called Gutenberg that changes the way you write your posts. This was being tested in earlier versions of WordPress as a mere plugin, out of curiocity I took a quick look at it during that period and went back to the regular style at the time just because I didn’t have much time to scope it out. Fast forward to the 5.0 update and now everyone has to use it (unless you install the classic editor plugin). I was tempted to go back to the classic editor myself, but then I decided to test myself by writing some posts with it.
Upon immediate glance I can tell this is designed for posting via smart devices… that’s strike 1. It’s great to include more devices so you can give writers a chance to post their thoughts or content from almost anywhere, but at the same time you shouldn’t neglect your other audience that holds a powerful tool that most mobile users sorely lack, a well sized keyboard to type on.
Gutenberg’s most praised feature is the “block” system… because this is 2018 and blocks are a thing. Instead of having a small toolbar and clicking an icon, like blockquoting something or posting an image, you click a plus and choose if you want an image, a quote, hell even a paragraph! You know, something you could write NATURALLY! Again, it makes more sense on mobile… but on PC that’s just an added step. Though not to completely bash it I do like being able to move paragraphs and other blocks around if I feel the need to arrange something.
I’ve mainly gone back to using the classic editor plugin. I like some of the ideas they’ve put into the new editor, but the inconveniences outweigh the new features. I’ll stick with the classic editor for now.