So, um, yeah. About that...
I have noticed that the people who are late are often so much jollier than the people who have to wait for them.
— E. V. Lucas
After three false starts, one complete rewrite, a global pandemic, a lot of procrastination, some technical issues, and a medical shlebobble which will be named later, I have finally gotten the blog rebuilt (again) and relaunched. The false starts and the rewrite all eventually got thrown away because I just wasn't happy with the direction they were going and really wanted to spend my development time working on added features instead of the base engine. So I auditioned several CMS engines in search for one that still allowed me maximum flexibility while taking care of the bulk of the heavy lifting. After building out the basics (again) I was all set to roll this out at the beginning of 2021 but I kept wanting to finish up this feature or that. And I wasn't really happy with the design -- or rather lack of design.
I spent quite a while -- too long, actually -- writing a small assortment of import scripts to fetch, reformat, import, and categorize all the existing articles and images dating back to the beginning of Blog Time. This took far langer than it should and it still wasn't quite perfect so I'm still cleaning up some things. Then both my proverbial and literal hands got forced when the server that the blog ran on went chunkity-chunkity-kabloo. At least that's the sound it made in my mind. In reality it made no noise at all and just got corrupted by a bad update. I could log into it but basic commands just wouldn't run correctly. Luckily, all of this stop/start/wait/start over development I had been doing was not on the server but on a local desktop computer and I was able migrate both the code and the database from there to a new server and get the site back up and running in fairly short order. That meant, however, that it got launched in it's not-quite-what-I-want-but-better-than-nothing state. Which am this upon which you are now feasting your orbs.
I'm still working on stuff bit by bit and will be posting more often but some things just aren't quite there yet. Next to come are comments as soon as I get a moderation process done.
Anyway, if anyone actually sees this, I do hope you're well and you should totally send me an email and let me know that you're still alive. Maybe we can arrange a visit. I'm bored and need a road trip.