Throughout my life I have often found that I just do not have enough time to do everything that I would like to do. Over the past four years I got married, switched jobs four times (same parent company), moved across the country twice, and started a family while managing a web hosting business, a web design business, a blog, a home lab, and much, much more. I quickly realized that if I wanted to keep doing things that I enjoyed I would need to become more efficient. The question becomes how? For me the change did not come easy, but after taking a good look at what I had going I realized that there were several areas where I could make my life simpler. For example, my web hosting business and web design business were hobbies that were becoming less and less relevant to me as my career accelerated into cloud architecture. By shutting down these projects I was able to get some much needed time back and focus on what was most important to me.
Next, it was time to look into ways to be more efficient. My website has always been what I would call a work in progress. I started my blog with PmWiki a long time ago and then was introduced to Joomla from my good friend Luca. While Joomla has treated me well over the years I noticed that I had customized the configuration so much that upgrading and maintaining my blog was a major time drain. Since web design was no longer a career path for me, I decided it was time to move to something more standard and easier to use. As such, I decided to move my site over to WordPress. I saw this transition as an opportunity to also grow my skill set. To that end, I decided to deploy and maintain my website using BOSH, a tool I have been using for the last couple years. While introducing BOSH is not keeping it simple, given my background with the tool and the career growth it would give me I figured it was worth the investment. The good thing about using BOSH to deploy my website was the default configuration given is extremely basic. By that I mean that things like SSL are not even enabled by default. Now, to be fair, it is relatively simple to enable additional features, but after taking a look at what I used SSL for I had to ask myself why? The only driver for SSL was for when I logged into the administrator portal to my site. Given that use case why enable SSL when I had a secure way of accessing the web server through other means (i.e. a VPN)? Asking the question of why and challenging myself to keep it simple resulted in my ability to maintain my blog, enhance my knowledge on a tool set, and spend time on other things that are important to me.
The primary reason for discussing this is to explain my absence over the last few weeks. I experienced a storage issue resulting in the permanent loss of my vCenter Server appliance and then my server decided it was no longer interested in operating in anything other than a read-only fashion. As such, I have migrated my blog to a new server and I have been working out the issues with the migration while the old site remained read-only. I am happy to announce that the transition is complete and I will be back to blogging! If you notice any issues with the site, please let me know!
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