No, I’m not dead, just resting.
True to form I couldn’t keep up. What threw me was the enforcement of two rules.
- Setup a system to retrieve the logs
- Implement a staging site
Logfiles are so very interesting to me. I love seeing what search engines have found the site and what they’re pulling. I love seeing when people have found my site, what they look at, how long they stay, and trying to work out who they might have been (possible because I only get four or five actual people a week). I love checking the referrals to see how they found me.
My current webhost only keeps the past 7 days logfiles, so I said to myself “no more posts till you get a system in place which pulls the logs and archives them”. Which I did actually get around to doing, but I don’t have a unix server running permanently (and its not the kind of thing I’d stuff around with windows to do), so it became a block to posting.
Just for the geek value I built a staging server for this site (in a vm). It goes wonderfully and I can edit, tweak, and admire myself without polluting the holy logs (above) with a zillion hits from myself. Only trouble with that is the great folk over at WordPress obviously don’t get a lot of people doing this and I’ve found some architectural obstacles in their software making it somewhat difficult to routinely publish updates from staging to production. Your basic stuff like defining the document root in one spot, for example.
Then there is some small want for a feedback loop pulling comments and trackbacks to staging.
Thence I’ve reflected on my job, or lack of a job at the moment, and thought “well if I’m going to make a push toward reskilling as an ASP.NET person then I should probably ‘eat my own dogfood’ and rebuild in asp.net.” Quelle problem. What is blogging software anyways? A lightweight cms. So, rather than using all this that I’ve created I’m plotting to tear it all down and start over. Yes, I’m rolling my eyes at myself too.
