Blog Beta

So, it’s been another good while since I’ve last updated my blog entries. Interestingly enough, I really feel like talking about this, since I haven’t mentioned anything positive on the computers & technology part of this blog in a while. I’ve been working on another blog server: a BETA for a new blog platform. The beta had A LOT of moving parts, which allowed me to learn a lot of new stuff related to server and secure web management, system security, and system maintenance. I’ll break it all down simple.

The Parts

  • The reverse proxy we’re using now.

  • The same web server we’re using now.

  • PHP 8.3

  • PHPMyAdmin

  • MariaDB

  • WordPress

The Idea

The idea was to take this blog, and move it over to a database driven platform that would allow me to do some more complex things with the blog than what I’m doing here now, which learn database management and security, and WordPress production at the same time. Now, having set everything up, securing it for the web, and doing a lot of playing around with WordPress management, I decided that it was above and beyond what I needed for this blog, simply to learn those things. WordPress alone had so many moving parts to it, that I just felt the learning curve to really design a professional looking production site similar to what I feel I have here was astronomical. I think WordPress can do some truly remarkable things for professional web designers, and that it has its place on the internet (which is why a large portion of the entire world wide web is now run on WordPress), but on top of all the additional moving parts to maintain and troubleshoot if something really goes wrong, it just was not for me.

A Few Extra Thoughts

PHP - I did a little bit of PHP scripting back in highschool, circa 2007 when PHP was still at around version 5.2, and while I had a lot of fun with doing that, and I recognize the language for its powerful scripting abilities and what it allows, I’m just not a computer programmer. I did not get into this blog with the intention of wanting to learn how to code directly in something like Visual Studio Code or the like, which is why I’m using this simple Markdown publisher to take the documents I create locally. Simple and clean.

MariaDB - I recently watched a documentary on YouTube about MySQL, MariaDB, and where they originated from to where they are today and why. Very interesting stuff, very powerful Open Source Software packages that open up a world of opportunity, whether you’re using them for things like finance, enterprise asset management tracking, or web development, I really enjoyed seeing how PHPMyAdmin interfaced between the database and gave the end user control over everything the database software had to provide. Perfect? No…but, pretty neat nonetheless.

Conclusion

While there was a lot to take away from my experience of experimenting with some of the post powerful web development technologies available to us today, I simply found it was too much overhead and too much bloat for what was needed here. Hence, there is no more blog beta; the box has been removed, I have gone back to what simply works, and I’m going to continue blogging with what we have. As I mentioned above, over time I will try to implement a few things that I think will help me out serverside to publish posts more efficiently, but this will all come in time.

That’s all for now, folks. As always,

Bless!