I have attempted to upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 from 12.04.5 three times, failing each time. The points of failure are complex and seemingly many. I can ignore the necessary upgrade until 12.04.5 hits end of life in 2017, but whatever cruft is preventing a clean upgrade may be allowing all sorts of bad things. I also use my server as testing environment for all of my books, which means I’m constantly installing and uninstalling a host of software. When I ran
ubuntu-support-status
I was surprised at how many packages I have installed that are no longer supported.
No matter how much I want to avoid it, It’s time to clean up my system.
Not just clean up. I want to move my site to HTTPS/SSL. The new Let’s Encrypt Certificate Authority should be in business in September, simplifying the process for obtaining an SSL certificate, and removing a major obstacle for making this move.
I’m also looking at migrating my site(s) back to WordPress from Drupal. Drupal is a marvelous CMS when you like to tinker under the hood, or you have a business site that needs extensive customization and complexity. But it’s not a good CMS when you don’t have the time to tinker, and you just want a place to write. With the upcoming changes for Drupal 8, I realized that I could either migrate to the new version, or I could migrate to WordPress: the work would be the same.
The advantages to WordPress is it is geared more towards just having a place to write. There is also more updated support for social networking, commentary, mobile devices, and a larger pool of weblog themes. Drupal is powerful, but I’m finding many of the modules I’m interested in have erratic support, at best. The Drupal environment is set up in such a way as to channel all interest in a certain functionality into one module. This is fine, except when the module developer tires of it, and no one picks it up. WordPress fosters a more competitive environment for functional extensions, so you’re almost always going to be able to find a supported plugin for what you need.
Moving from WordPress to Drupal is a snap, but the reverse isn’t true. In fact, it’s been downright ugly in the past, requiring either a great deal of hacking, or an expensive migration service. Thankfully, this has changed with a new PHP script and associated tutorial, both of which help remove most of the pain. I hope.
I expect, though, that my site will end up even more fractured than it is now, with my many moves between domains, weblogs, and software—not to mention removing dated content, and merging and splitting weblogs. Such is life. One of the advantages of today’s web environment is it’s adaptable to change. A broken link is no longer the anathema it once was, and 404 errors are like gray hair and bad knees: a sign of increasing maturity.
All of this is my way of saying that things are going to be erratic around here for the next couple of months. Of course, I’ve been so quiet in my space for so long that folks might not even notice the erratic nature of my web site. I’m hoping to get better about this, too.
