And failed and left my site offline most of the day. So I’ll have to try some stuff on the side and give it another shot.

I just moved this blog to slightly different hosting infrastructure. Because of that I had some funky issues with character encoding yesterday. I believe that’s fixed now, but there may be other things that take me time to notice and fix up. Also, I still have a couple other things to set up so that I can FINALLY have https working for this blog. As part of this infrastructure change, I discovered and fixed at least one long-running issue that was causing problems with that. So if things are offline for a bit over the next few days or weeks - that’s why.

I’m not a huge fan of plugins for key parts of the site. There are some blog posts that no longer make sense because they used, for example, the iframe plugin to embed Google Maps. That said, my previous solution for displaying code on the site - special CSS is also brittle because I lose it whenever I change themes. I think at some point I also lost it when I upgraded a theme. So, since Wordpress is all about blocks now, thanks to Gutenberg, I’ve decided to try out this Code Syntax plugin I heard about on Wordpress Tavern.

When I switched to Twenty Nineteen almost a year ago, I wasn’t sure if I was going to stick with the theme so I never did my theme documentation blog post. So here’s what the previous theme, Twenty Sixteen, which I had for about 2.5 years, looked like:

And here are the previous theme changes:

/2018/12/14/just-switched-to-twenty-nineteen-theme/ /2015/04/21/lets-do-the-theme-change-again/ /2013/04/18/changing-themes-after-4-years/ /2009/02/05/changing-themes-again-2/ /2008/04/09/changing-themes-again/

/2007/09/30/a-reminder-of-my-previous-theme/

I’m not sure I like how the main blog page looks. While it seems to copy something like Ghost or Jekyll (some of the Wordpress competitors popular among the technical set), It has something of an unfinished look to it. I do really like the way individual posts look, particularly when they have a featured image set. And, to some degree, thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and other sites - users are much more likely to land on a blog post than on the main blog page. But right now I’m not sure I’m happy with the theme. I may switch back early next week. If I stick with Twenty Nineteen, I’ll make my usual post about changing themes that contains some screenshots to remember how the blog looked with Twenty Sixteen.

I haven’t completely changed hosting for all my domains, but I have changed it for this one. So it’s possible things may be broken for a bit while I root out all the errors. Or maybe I got lucky and everything will be perfect after the DNS is done propagating.

Another event has once again cemented my thoughts that the informed technical person needs to run their own services rather than depend upon the benevolence of companies. It started with Google closing Google Reader. Then Facebook and Twitter got extra censorious. During all that, people started abusing DMCA requests on Youtube. Recently Google decided to close Google code. Now there the Ars Technica story that SourceForge is installing malware on software that is considered abandoned on their site.

Almost exactly two years ago, I changed to the Twenty Thirteen theme. It was a breath of fresh air after what I’d used before. The font is beautiful and it was much less cluttered than the themes I’d used before. One of the things I like is that the color scheme quickly tells the user what kind of post I’m making. In practice, the post types made a bit less sense for the way I blog than if I were a Tumblr refuge, but it does make for a nice, colorful theme.

I’ve been hearing about the members of the Giant Bombcast talk about participating in the Extra Life video game marathon for a few years now. For some reason, when the 2014 event happened, I decided to look into it to see if I could participate this year. When I started looking into it around a month ago, I realized I wouldn’t be able to participate in the big 24 hour day because that’s when someone’s getting married. But, then I found out that the organizers are OK with creativity in the marathon was run. There are others, like me, who raise money and play games throughout the year.

I can’t believe I’ve been blogging on here for TEN YEARS! Here’s a link to my first post. Time has really flown by! Ten years ago I didn’t even think blogging would still be a thing in ten years time. So far I’m still on Wordpress, although I finally moved away from the server. prefix in the domain name. I still enjoy expressing myself and I still love when I get engagement from my readers.