Personal Technology Changes

Today is a day of pretty drastic technology changes for me. I’m taking my technology blog which was at thecodinghumanist.com, my biblical studies blog at archaicchristianity.com and my personal site at ericsowell.com and combining them all into one here at ericsowell.com Of course I intend to put the appropriate redirects and such in place so that the links across the web to my blogs aren't broken but I expect to lose some Google juice in the process anyway.

But that’s okay. The tech setup I’m moving to will make things better for me. I actually created this blog split a number of years ago because I figured the overlap between my tech readers and my biblical studies readers would be small. This is still probably true. But now I decided that I don’t actually care. I am a conglomeration of both and I’d rather my ericsowell.com site to reflect that.

From a technical perspective this also represents a drastic change. I started on Blogspot (I’ll be moving those posts soon as well) but then started on my own server with Das Blog. I quickly changed that and wrote my own. It was a good learning experience. When ASP.NET MVC came out, I rewrote it again. That was a good learning experience as well. This is my latest version. It is also written in ASP.NET MVC but I am eschewing all databases and moving to flat files. I tend to author my technical posts in Visual Studio and this makes things much easier. It also means my posts are in source control. That’s a win. And I’m also moving the hosting to Azure. This will be my first Azure site but hopefully this move won’t end up being a stupid idea. I’m REALLY looking forward to being able to git-deploy all my blog changes.

The biggest question I had in all of this was around comments. With no database I had to come up with some plan. I briefly thought about turning them off but decided not too since in many cases the comments end up being the best things about the posts. You guys, as it turns out, are pretty awesome. So I ended up with the notion to split my comments up into two forms. For posts that have comments turned on, I would use Disqus to manage them. When I turn comments off on a post, I will actually move the comments to source control like all of my existing comments. Your comments get the same semi-permanent character of my posts. Because you are awesome. Hopefully I won’t end up finding this process tedious. Getting rid of tedium is one of my major goals for this move.

Progress

As of today, many of my older posts will have issues with broken image links and such. That kinda stinks but I will fix them up over time. I’ll keep a running log today of how this process is going here. I imagine no one will care but me. But that’s okay. As for progress, I already had the website on Azure setup (that was super easy), I have the git deploy setup (it pulls from github, which is awesome), the basic code of the site ready, posts from 2012 onward edited and a simple, low-decor responsive design.

5:57 PM

I have been deployed for about an hour. I’m hovering right around half of allowed memory usage (512 MB). This is somewhat troublesome to me but I guess I should expect high memory since I am storing the entire dataset in memory. Perhaps I will need to tweak that later. It looks like I 404s aren't too bad though I've had to update a few things. So far the check in/auto-deploy from github thing is working great.

6:40 PM

Finally got disqus working. Yay for progress!

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