The Life-Changing Magic of Server Migrations
After a bit of procrastination, a bit of noodling, and a generous pinch of typing I’ve started to migrate from my old web host to a new one. I’m starting with my personal stuff, and will then move the client work over.
The basic guts of the set up:
- FastMail for email, and as my DNS control interface
- I’m using blot.im to host my primary personal website (this one, eli.li)
- A combination of Linode and Netlify for my other hosting needs
I’m still ironing out some of the details, but am feeling pretty good about the landscape. I looked into some alternatives to FastMail, but their offering seems to be the most solid, and the DNS control stuff is preeemo. Wicked nice.
To boot, moving my website from my previous web host to blot was a breeze, and resolved the issue I was having wherein my posts weren’t making it to micro.blog. I’m back, baby!
To say I’m impressed with blot is a massive understatment. It is awesome. I don’t have anything to gripe about…nothing, however, is so perfect, and I look forward to writing a future blog post all about the migration process and my blot set up (huge shout out to @amit for all his help, as well as to David who makes and maintains blot — his support is truly next-level).
That was all a preamble, though — the primary reason for this post is to note that I think a few things are going to change around here.
The medium being the message and all…
In the past my blog was more of a link-log, filled with likes and replies. While my website still supports all that lovely IndieWeb taxonomy, I am going to post round-up style posts, aggregating a bunch of links and comments/quotes into a single post. We’ll see if I can get into it, or how it changes things.
The other big change is tags! My old website had tags, but they didn’t really do much. The human ecologist in me is excited to start inter-linking posts by way of tag. Keep a look out for more on that, too!
Finally, the bit of my new website that I am most excited about? Custom css per-post! I have a custom metadata field associated with each post. If left blank, the site defaults to my standard css file, if, however, I put in the name of a different css file, I can associate a unique css file with a specific post!
I’ve always liked the idea of a site’s content and styling being linked. Just as I work to preserve permalinks, I want to preserve what the site looked like at a certain time. I’m not going to use this feature for all posts by any means. Heck, I might not even use it very often, but I’m excited to have the option.
Rah raw ra onward!
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