I have some time to give a bit of a longer recap of what I have been doing the last couple of years while Montreal Tech Writer was offline.
I actually run this website via a Docker container created by a wonderful programmer named Oskar Hane who now works at NEO4J, the graph database company. This container proved quite versatile as I stored the whole almost 30Gb thing on Docker Hub at no charge. When it came time this week to boot it up using a Ubuntu VM on my new Thinkpad interfacing with a DigitalOcean droplet all was kosher except for the fact that I had definitively lost my password and could not get the WordPress instance in the container to email me a reset because I never got the email facility working for it—remember the container is many years old at this point and Hane had never built email-capacity into it.
(Incidentally, the container contained all the necessary code in one shot along with the database. This is not standard practice for containerization but was a sorta hack that worked really well for me as I have only one single container to manage that encapsulates my whole site. Beats those pesky 5 backup files via Updraft Plus!)
Anyhow, to recover I had to go into the MySQL while first logging into the container with the proper Docker command which was, for me: docker exec -it <container name> /bin/bash
I then changed the password using MySQL with a hash and low and behold I was back in and able to access the backend and wrote my first short post in two years yesterday!
Well, that was yesterday but what about 2 years away from this blog? Actually, I did spent a lot of this time writing, releasing 5 books on Amazon, starting to write Medium posts as mentioned yesterday, and more.
I also built several websites, did some teaching on Linux, set up my classes on Clascity (the platform is pretty sparse so I may move this over to Howdy, a collaborative teaching tool built by Darius Vaillancourt), experimented with other platforms, did a ton of reading, and otherwise lived life.
I have also been messing around on Mastodon again since the #TwitterMigration—I was very early to the party writing It’s a Fediverse Planet way back in 2019!
After Covid calmed down however, I did go through a rough patch affecting my mental health like so many other millions and talk about it on a Spotify podcast I produced called Doomer Maybe (the podcast is dormant and may get revamped soon).
I am about to begin building new websites for various clients and will post links to them when done. I plan to use Elementor as the Page Builder, and host some sites on Siteground as some clients are based in Europe.
I will also post a price & process mini-guide in the near future for prospective clients to scope.
More technical discussions to follow shortly – thanks!
