My Desultory Blog

Posted By Admin on December 10, 2015

I move my WordPress  blog to Digital Ocean‘s smallest cloud based Linux server and the move is now complete, I think.  Everything seems to be working as it should, although I’ve experienced a couple snags.

All posts have been consolidated (except this one) under the RichC user_id and I’ve updated to WordPress to 4.4. The Linux “swap” as been set on the DO “micro” cloud server to allocate an additional 3GB (or maybe it was 4GB?) of disk RAM which will hopefully prevent “out of memory” errors. Others have had issues when running WordPress on the smallest cloud servers so we’ll see if this helps before upgrading to a bigger (and more expensive) cloud server.  Tweaking has been fun … as those tech-types who like to “learn by doing” can attest.

Most images (except the WordPress uploaded media), PDFs, AV and larger content have been moved to independent servers (some on Amazon S3 instance and about 10GBs of archives on one of my company’s servers).

I used both phpMyAdmin to correct user_id, URLs and links from old posts, although I’m sure there are still broken links in the over 5000 past posts and pages.

Screenshot of the “hopefully” stable blog as of December 10, 2015.

Category: Blogs | 2 Comments »
Tags: apache, database, digital ocean, host, server, update, upgrade, wordpress

Posted By RichC on December 10, 2015

20s?? Well for Drew (photo) … for only a few more days!

Katelyn and Drew are in Arizona celebrating Drew’s 30th birthday with his family this week and they sent me a  couple photos from the desert and in a hot air balloon flight — beautiful!  It is great to see all three kids (Taylor went to England in June), enjoying their vacation time. As I recall, our 20s were just the beginning … the best years are yet to come!  BTW … Happy Birthday Drew, a few days early.

Category: Personal, Photos, Travel | No Comments »
Tags: arizona, balloon, birthday, drew, family, katelyn, Travel

Posted By RichC on December 9, 2015

For the most part this is really all about testing the latest updates to the new Digital Ocean micro cloud server while attempting to run WordPress 4.4. I’m also using an alternate server for image hosting so that I can continue to post with the long in the tooth and no longer updated Microsoft LiveWriter (I sure wish they would continue with this software???)

Anyway the Farmers Almanac has those of us in the Midwest “snow filled and frigid” as will be much of the country. Are you ready?

Category: Weather | No Comments »
Tags: farmers almanac, test, weather, winter

Posted By RichC on December 8, 2015

Warmer forecasts, no production cut by OPEC and inventory surplus is keeping energy prices low and crude oil has moved to seven year lows. The impact is being felt by small leveraged U.S. oil companies who are on the brink of bankrupcy and even creating waves throughout the economy. As I tweeted…

Oil prices fell to their low­est point in seven years Mon­day, ham­mer­ing en­ergy in­dus­try stocks as many in­vestors bet that heav­ily in­debted pro­duc-ers, hav­ing weath­ered months of low com­mod­ity prices, are now at greater risk of go­ing out of busi­ness.
WSJ Link

Category: Energy, Financial, News, Social Media | No Comments »
Tags: economy, energy, investing, oil, wsj

Posted By RichC on December 7, 2015

After fastening aluminum angle to the floor and leveling the corner with sand, I packed and filled the base with brick to continue adding our old catalytic woodstove to the shop. Then it was time to start the dry-stack walls … until I ran out of spare brick. Thankfully the brick is available so should be able to pick up this week and eventually cut and stack about 70 more bricks. I’m using a drystack technique (fastening to the wall) so that it can all be easily disassembled.  Once done, I’ll attach the flue to the new chimney and figure out the cap/mantle area to cover the brick. It will be nice to use some of our piles of wood to add heat to the shop.

Category: Misc, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: brick, pool house, woodstove, workshop

Posted By RichC on December 6, 2015

Actually needed a photo to test the new server running WordPress.

Category: Holiday, Personal, Photos | No Comments »
Tags: christmas, house, lights

Posted By RichC on December 6, 2015

Slowly but surely I'm rebuilding the archives and associated linked images from my old back ups for MyDesultoryBlog. There may be a reason to keep things in multiple locations BUT it does make upgrading servers a bit more difficult.

The long story is that through Consolidated Printing and Publishing, I have worked with the same hosting company for my customers since 1997. I've been through upgrades before on our dedicated and VPS reseller account, but unfortunately times are changing. My current host is selling to a company who has acquired a number of hosting companies … and the feedback has not been all that positive. Consolidation in a competitive business I suppose? Anyway, I already host a couple clients on shared servers who have merged with the bigger company and facing a change, I decided it was time to restructure.

I've moved most of my customers, with mixed success, over the last couple of month and decided it was time to move my personal blog as well. Unfortunately I had forgotten the convoluted combination of domains and varied storage servers (images/pdfs/video) I've added and tried over the years. Just to name a few, there was my Webstar home server, the out of business Posterous, Amazon's S3, Flickr photos, items added through WordPress.com (different than one's own install), items served up on a couple of my own co-hosted domains (myarchive.us and richcorbett.us) and finally media within the previously two server upgrades with my WordPress.org install. A quick and painless move it is not!

So after my first attempt was to consolidate on an Amazon “instance” (their name for a cloud based Linux server) was unfortunately a complete failure. Their EC2 server worked out to be a bit pricey besides making it difficult to manage. My second choice was a DigitalOcean cloud based server … very lean and self-modifiable with their security restrictions; the biggest issue for me is the lack of the unsecure but widely used FTP (must use SFTP which is not supported by my iPad Blogsy App or my laptop's Microsoft LiveWriter). Still … WordPress has improved it's web interface since the early days so maybe I can adapt?

Back to the start of this blog … I'm thinking about a work around so that I can still use a WordPress “posting client” like Blogsy and LiveWriter. I'm contemplating serving all WordPress and database files on an inexpensive DigitalOcean cloud-based Linux LAMP set-up while spliting up images and video to one of my company servers which permits FTP and manual uploads of video and large docs to Amazon's S3. It's not all set up yet since I'm uploading Gigs of gzipped directories before attempting the move. This post will be the first attempt from Blogsy to the DigitalOcean WordPress install. Crossing my fingers.

More to come …

Category: Blogs, Misc, Personal, Tablet | No Comments »
Tags: blogsy, digital ocean, hosting, mydesultoryblog, server, upgrade, wordpress

Posted By RichC on December 5, 2015

Testing the LiveWriter access to Digital Ocean with sFTP.

FAILED … I’ll keep the photo and update with a “what’s going on” post tomorrow.

Category: Blogs | 1 Comment »
Tags: test

Posted By RichC on December 4, 2015

This content is restricted.

Category: Audio, Music, Video | No Comments »
Tags: joni mitchell, mp3, Music, oldies, taxi, youtube

Posted By RichC on December 3, 2015

I’m not going to repost the lost message from Thanksgiving in Wayzata, MN this year, but some of the personal photos are on Facebook (I don’t post there too often, but in case you want to connect click here).

Category: Holiday, Personal, Photos, Social Media | No Comments »
Tags: facebook, family, thanksgiving