It’s like Roadkill/Vice-Grip-Garage but for a website.

The equivalent of finding my old site in a junkyard and getting it running well enough to drive home for further tinkering.

However many months (years) ago, I noticed that the wordpress installation I had in godaddy since the mid-aughts stopped working, and it looked like it was pretty badly hacked. This isn’t surprising, I never had SSL set up, and I was pretty much spending all my time in social media having abandoned my plan of “I’ll post most of my thoughts to my website and then just link to them and if anyone is interested in what I have to say/think they can click a link.”

(As an aside, mucking about in old website wiring VERY MUCH makes me feel my age)

I got this new site mostly set up last year and ignored it… and then this last month I noticed the SSL/HTTPS certificate expired and in the rigmarole to get a new certificate I noticed that AWS doesn’t really provide mail-handling like GoDaddy used-to which meant the scripted wordpress site was using “user@example.com” because it couldn’t confirm the email I actually wanted to use. Thus, over the last few days with the help of this MetaBlog article on how to wire Lightsail AWS WordPress to Amazon’s Simple Email Service and this Lightsail documentation on how to use the bncert script that will automatically install free rotating “lets encrypt” SSL certs. Now we’re ‘back in business’ so to speak.

The initial transfer out of GoDaddy/Dotster/DynDNS to AWS stuff a year ago was the equivalent of new tires, semi-functional brakes, transmission that reverses AND advances… and engine running. This latest set of tinkering is the equivalent of stopping at a gas-station/friend’s conveniently located shop mid-trip to replace the fuel filter and zip-tie down some things that were rubbing/squeaking. Now I consider the website “home” and able to start detailing/rust-stop.

Now that it’s home, I feel a bit pressured to actually DO stuff with this website. I still have old podcast files and such and I figured I could upload “archive” episodes as an exercise of listening to myself from 10+ years ago to see how I’ve changed (and also perform pre-allocution with “I understand this opinion I held in 2009 when I was 28 is terrible and cringey” warnings). But it’s also where I can write little essays about the hows and whys of my various moves about the Internet. It’s also nice to have in the garage in case I suddenly want/need to have it become the fulcrum of all my business/hobby needs going forward (at which point I can attach Full Domain email which I consider the equivalent of Air Conditioning).