Blogging

Bye Bye Facebook Sort of

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Hi there, Facebook friends! I hope you’re all doing well. At the beginning of this year, I stopped posting to my “wall” (or whatever they’re calling it these days). But I’m still blogging—I have been for almost 22 years, and I don’t plan on stopping. All new blog entries will go to my Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/scott.weinstein.me/

Why, you ask? Well, Facebook and I (and all social media, for that matter) have a complex relationship. I only post on Facebook so family and friends who care to know what’s going on can see my blog updates. Otherwise, I’ve found social media to be far less enjoyable than I once thought it could be. Plus, Facebook prevents automatic posting of external links to personal accounts. That’s why, years ago, I set up my Personal Page.

If you’re already following my page, thanks! If not—and if you still want to keep up with what’s going on with me and the fam or you moderately enjoy my writing—you should follow the page.

I won’t be posting here anymore, with the exception of occasional reminders over the next few months to follow the page.

The Story of My Blog Turning 20

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This blog turns 20 years old today. I have tried to think of something else I’ve been doing consistently like this blog for a longer time. Other then working in technology I’m really not coming up with anything.

2003 does feel like multiple worlds away when thinking about it. I would not have predicted keeping up this habit on and off for 20 years. Who knew that this novel at the time concept of publicly writing about what you’re thinking that Gus showed me would endear for so long.

I know I go through bouts of not publishing and then writing more content than I can publish however it’s always been something that I enjoy doing. Let’s see if I make another 20 years.

$8.89 Web Hosting

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Last year when the promotional deal I had for three years of Web hosting was running out I purchased a VPS costing about $24.00 for the year. A VPS, aka Virtual Private Server is a Virtual Machine at a hosting provider that is setup just for you/me. It is a nice playground to let me install use the compute power however I want it. The deal I bought I thought was great. To renew via the traditional hosting plan I had at the time would have run me like £15 a month. I wrote about the crazy costs of web hosting when i purchased the VPS (Virtual private Server) aka a Virtual Machine dedicated for my use at a hosting provider.

I have had really good luck with the VPS and the provider. I even purchased a 2nd more powerful VPS when they had a New Years sale. I use each VPS for different purposes however the one I used for hosting I have used all year. The only slight downside is that its my responsibility to manage and maintain. In a big deal however it is in the back of my head what happens if I have a catastrophic failure. I do have back ups it would be awesome effort to get the system restored. Thanksgiving started rolling around I kept my eye out for new deals for hosting. When Black Friday came around the same provider that offered the VPS deal had a deal for what they call CPANEL hosting for $8.89 a year. Basically that means they were offering a managed hosting package for less money a year than many plans offer for a month. There were some small limitations on the number of domain’s i could link to the account. For a few dollars more i could increase the offering. For my needs the $8.89 plan was just fine. I “splurged” and bought 2 years for less than $18.00.

One thing I like about this provider is when they offer a deal it’s not an introductory one. Meaning I just renewed VPS purchase last year and I feel exactly the same amount for the renewal. This is a refreshing change from pretty much all other mainstream Web hosting providers at the deal the offer is only good the first time you buy it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been testing out there setup. It has been pretty stable. Anything I have wanted to do i have been able to. Building that confidence today I migrated my mail and blog over to the new hosting. The VPS i have is not going away. I renewed that already for the next year. I will continue to use it for some other apps i host and a few other things however i will entrust my blog to the hosting provider instead of running on my own VM.

And no I cannot tell the difference between the £100+ per year hosting vs the $8.98 a year one. That is what amuses me.

Now lets hope that after writing how things look stable they do not blow up in my face tomorrow.

The Story of My Blog Being Old Enough to Drink (In The UK At Least)

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What feels like several lifetimes ago I started this blog. In reality it was 18 years ago today. It is so weird to think how much my life has changed in those 18 years. There may have been dry spells where I did not write for a while (a year or so now and again) I have continuously journaled in that 18 years. For someone who used to get claustrophobic in 2 year mobile phone contracts I am impressed that I kept at it.

With a long list of post ideas here is hoping for another 18.

My Self Hosted Site Is Alive

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If you are reading this then first of all thanks. Second that means my switch to my self hosted server is working (for now). I have a post about the what and why. That story is still being edited however I needed to post something to confirm that if I or anyone see’s this post on the site then you are being routed to the new site. if you do not see this, well then you will have no idea that you are pointing to the old site.

My 17th Blog-aversary

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If my blog was a person it would be able to drive. I cannot believe I have been keeping this Blog since March 2003. It feels like yesterday and a lifetime ago all at the same time. There were plenty of times I didn’t write much for months. There were other times where i was posting several times a week. I am happy with my queue of ideas and 1-2 posts a week. As it was in 2003 this site and writting has been a great relaxing outlet…

Notable posts, my first post ever. Then my first post I actually wrote anything meaningful.

Another notable detail that is only semi-geeky to talk about today is as of today I have well over 2,500 posts.

So I Went and Got a Facebook Page

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So funny story. In the effort of evaluating my social media use I went and got a Facebook page. For friends and family please like and follow it. I will be posting blog entries to there and not on my wall going foward.

The backstory to this is in July and August I sought out to decrease my social media usage and data exposure. I wrote about it and will post that series in a bit. As i was doing that I (yet again) attempted to get rid of Facebook. I realized that I do use it to push updates to my blog. My blog metrics show that is a lot (for me) of traffic. I decided since my blog posts are public anyway why not do a facebook page. It allows me to stop posting on my own timeline. It also lets me schedule updates to my blog. that is something i cannot do anymore since Facebook killed that years ago. If i do that i can post to facebook blog entries without actually logging in. No distractions for me!

So please like and follow my page, or not…

The Story of My Site’s Hopefully Last Name

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It’s another year so its time for me to overthink my blog setup. Alright maybe i dont do it “every” year however sometimes I do. Last year I changed my blog domain name to scottodyssey.com. I did it in 1, hopes of getting more google rank vs my obscure .ac domain. 2, to better reflect what i was thinking the direction of the site was. Flash forward to now and i am thinking of simplification. For years i have lived with the delusion of anonymity on this site by obscurity. I knew if someone wanted to find me they could. THe illusion felt good though! Now a days thinking abut personal branding using just my first name or a cute blog title isn’t what i am looking for. Instead i am simplying to scott.weinstein.me. I owned the domain name and used it for some email for years. I figured why not simplify.

The change for me is minor. The bigger changes are in how i use a bunch of other domain names behind the schemes for mail and other things that is bigger. My plan is to downsize and save some money on a few more expensive domains that i am under utilising. For some of them it may take a while to move all the things i use them for off of them. In the long run it likely makes sense.

This change allows me to have a simple domain that reflects me. It is my name after all.

www.scottodyssey.com will stick around mirroring my new URL for about 10 months until the domain expires.

Who Knew My URL Vanity Would Hurt Page Rank

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At the tail end of last year I retitled this blog. I did it to better represent what it had evolved into. It also represented future ventures I was going to have after moving. The other reason is I really didn’t have any sort of name for it. It was a sad state of affairs.

At the time I made a conscious decision not to change the URL of the site. That was because over the years I had changed it a few times and really got no value out of making the change.  I wrote about the history of this site here. I kept simply blog.Scott.ac. It represented one of my oldest domains and that this was a blog. I also liked the simple domain name scott dot something.  Since then I’ve had some time to read about how page ranking works in search engines. Apparently the fact that my site is a.AC domain significantly hurts searches. That is because it gets priority in the country localization that is the Ascension Islands. I generally write this blog for me however I do put some effort into it so having an optimized to get more views is a nice bonus. Who knew that the reason I liked the old URL was causing it to not get much visibility like it used to.

Having used the site title “A Scott Odyssey” for about seven or eight months now, I kind of like it. I relate a lot to the theme of the Odyssey, journey that I wrote more about it on this blogs “About Blog” page.