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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.

The Story of The New New New Web Hosting Provider

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I have had numerous hosting providers in the past 25 years. Do I date myself by saying that? It is the truth I guess. I have hosted a website in one form or another for easily over 20 years. Trying to think of them I cannot recall all the providers I have used. I have had full service web providers. I have hosted my own. Way back when I first started out I even used free sites like Geocities or hosting via my AOL account. Yes I had one of those. I have had dedicated service providers for just mail and blog. And probably for a while I might have done nothing other than simply used Gmail. Over two years ago I moved to a provider siteground.co.uk. They hosted my blog, some email domains of mine that are not on Protonmail and any odd and end webiste I put up. For what they offer it is probably overkill for me. I signed up because the previous provider I had Hostpoint.sh contract was up. Hostpoint was on the expensive side.  They were a great provider for what they offered. The cost benefit for me did not make it economically sensible to continue to use them.  Siteground had a really good deal so i signed up for a 3 year contract with them. For me three years is like a lifetime. I never used to like 1 to 2 year mobile phone contracts. The deal was too good to pass up so I signed for that term.

Now as I write this I have less than 6 months on my site ground contract I looked at how much the renewal cost will be for my hosting. Without the deal the prices it is about triple what I was spending. I have had zero problems with Siteground. Like Hostpoint they have been a fantastic hosting provider. My challenge is for what I use them for the price they’re charging just seems ridiculous. I could host a site myself at home if I wanted to sort out mail relaying. I do not want to so I started looking for alternative providers. Oddly most hosting providers are not very cheap.  yeah $5-$15 (£3-£12) or so sounds inexpensive however it adds up over the year. Most of the good ones are on the higher end of that range.

Giving up on the relitivly expensive consumer proivders I ended up looking at lowednbox.com for deals for a VPS.  If you do not know a VPS is. a Virtual Private Server. So basically a virtual machines at a hosting provider. A friend showed me the lowendbox site ages ago and i really didn’t bother looking into a VPS.  I was doing too much with my Raspberry Pi’s so did not want to pay for any remote systems.  Now however a cheap (£1-£3) a month VPS (Virtual Private Server) might just do it for me.  Most of what is offered at the £1 range may not be enough RAM for my needs however for slightly more or basically £15-£23 a year i can get a pretty decent virtual server that i could replicate most of what i get from a provider. In my search I even found a provider that does shared hosting (what most people get as webhosting) for $1.50 a month.

I wasn’t sure what i wanted so i picked up two seperate deals (3 if you could a VPS i got for a VPN project that i may write about another time) from lowendbox.com.  I got the cheap $1.5 a month shared hosting as well as a VPS for a year for £22.  Even with both providers I am paying 25% of what i would have paid if i renewed siteground.

After a bunch of trial and error with the cheap shared hosting provider and the VPS I settled on the VPS. While I was figuring out what to do and realised the $1.50 a month basic provider didn’t seem to be working out I approached the situation a bit differently. My VPS can support my website pretty easily. Even if there is a reliability issue the website doesn’t need to be up 99.99% of the time like email kinda needs to be. That meant I could decouple my mail hosting from my website if I could do it cheaply enough. I went about trying to find an email only hosting provider. The problem was just like with regular hosting everyone offered really cheap introductory rates and then the price was much higher. With email only hosting providers it was kind of funny since the price they were offering I could buy a cheap complete hosting package for the same amount of money. I then continue to look for relatively easy to maintain out of the box email applications so I could possibly host a dedicated email VPS. That was proving problematic.

In my research around hosting my own mail on a dedicated VPS I stumbled across someone reviewing a relatively inexpensive email hosting provider. Their annual plans that offered more than what I needed were pretty cheap. What was even more interesting was the fact that they offered a lifetime plan that was only slightly more limited than the annual offering I was looking at. That lifetime plan options was also more than enough for my needs. It was approximately three years worth of hosting upfront to get the lifetime plan however the company seemed to be around for a while and pretty stable. I assume that I could at least get a return on my investment in the first three years. If I am lucky I won’t have to worry about paying for mail hosting for a while beyond that. The email provider was MXRoute.

I set up a few of the email domains that are use already and the system has been pretty stable. The final cut over was moving the mail domain my mum uses and that I sometimes use. The move was pretty easy. The only challenge was setting up mum up while she is in the US and I am in the UK. The fix was getting her to use GMAIL. She had a GMAIL account she previously used already. I just directed her GMAIL account to pull from her old hosting provider I had. I then switched her over to gmail in two FaceTime sessions with her. Then once GMAIL was working I simply changed the POP account settings in GMAIL web for her and migrated the MX records of the domain. Overall there was not may issues.

With mail sorted I went back to the VPS I setup and got my blog setup. I decided to use Yunohost for the VPS. it is an app that sits on top of Debian that lets me administer the server and install other apps pretty easy. it had a one click install for WordPress (what I use for the blog) as well as many other applications. After playing around with the setup for a while I decided to move the blog over and hope for the best. I found a plugin that pretty easily migrated the blog from one instance of WordPress to another. I then changed my DNS and everything moved over pretty well. I am finishing writing this in on 6-April, exactly one month from when I moved over to my VPS. So far things are working fine. Only thing different for me and the old provider so far is that I need to remember to monthly take a backup of the site in case I break something.

Overall my VPS is costing me £24 a year. If I kept site ground that price would not cover 2 months on the regular priced plan I would have to move to when my contract runs out. Now lets hope I do not mess up my setup since I only have myself and friends to fix it vs a provider!

Editing note I wrote this in Feb 2021 and agave been slow to post. Funny enough even though I change my tech setup a lot this post is still accurate a year and a half later.

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.

The Origin Of my Origin Stories

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For my birthday I felt a bit nostalgic. I finally will post this entry I wrote almost a year ago. I simply had a lot I wrote and never was sure when to post it. So here I am.

For over a year now (I started writing this post in Jan 2020) I have been thinking about things I am interested in writing about. As much as I like to share, this blog is really for me to just write above all else. That is why I jump around to several different unrelated topics. In thinking about what I write about or want to write about I broke down my writing into a few different categories. Some of them like technology or writing about the girls I’ve been doing for a while. Writing about life as an ex-pat is also not really new anymore either.

There are some distinctly new categories I decided to focus some time on as well. One of which is stories about my dad. The inspiration for that came about around the time he died. In talking about all the funny interesting stories about him he got thinking that I wanted to write some of them down. I have written and posted a few already. There are many more I just haven’t wanted to address however they seem like pretty good stories.

After I started brainstorming about ideas to write about my dad I realized I probably want to write about some things about my childhood and things that happend long ago (aka childhood or single life). The working “category” for those are my origin stories. This particular post was inspired because there’s one story I want to tell. As I started thinking about how to tell it, I realized it is really three separate stories. Each one related and building off the other one. Or that is how it flows for me. As I fleshed those stories out I realised there are more beyond those that I find interesting and would want to tell.

Another category I don’t write a lot about is work. I used to do that often. If you search the archives of this blog you’ll find many work-related posts. There used to be more. However I documented previously how I had to curtail that due to minor issue while working at Parksearch. Nothing bad happened. It was actually pretty funny, even when it happened. I can’t seem to find the right keyword to find that story or else I would share it now. Long story short I originally wrote about work long before it was common and became probilimatic with conflicts of interest. Now I simply do not do it to be safe.

If I orchestrate this properly this intro post will go up right before I start posting some origin stories. Now all I have to do is go write them.

The photo in this post is of a rocket launch pad my dad had at our beach club in the late 1980’s. My dad and rockets will be a post at some point however when looking for a photo that best sums up any origin stories i thought a rocket one was the most appropriate.

The Return of Writing

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A recurring theme for me in my writing is to talk about my writing. I think the reason the topic comes up is I go through a very visible cycle of writing and not writing. Other than periods of lack of motivation I cannot figure out the pattern. There are different ways that I write. The most public being this blog. I also privatly journal. I use an app called Day One. I have for years. I love it. Besides journalling about things I am finding that I use Day One too log where I have gone and what I have done. It easy since you can geo-tag entries and you can also attach photos to them. It paints a good picture of what I’ve done on a day. Even when I have been less consistent sometimes about actually writing about things I have done.

In the past three or four years I have also taken to writing actions in a paper notebook. The intention is to then complete things and check them off on the day. Anything else goes into my electronic task list. I have read that the tactile act of physically writing helps in memory. As much as I like the idea of physically writing it was something that I would only do every now and again. I would go a few days and then stop for long periods of time. Right around the time of the lockdown I started writing actions out on paper more consistently. I know that I started doing it daily after the lockdown. I did try to do it more frequently even before the lockdown. I remember packing my notebook in my book bag I took to go into the office in March.

Through April, May, and June my physical writing consisted of writing out action lists of things I remembered that I needed to do that may or may not have already been in my electronic to-do list. It was my way of clearing my mind of things I was thinking needed done. sometimes the actions were already in my to do list. As I would think of things I would write them down. If I would complete something I would check it off the list. If I didn’t finish it that day I put it on my Trello board (my electronic task list) to work on later I will mark a T where I would normally check the completed action. If I didn’t do the action and I didn’t put it on a Trello board I would simply mark it with an X. I thought it was simple enough.

I have for years had an aversion to paper. When I finished a day of writing in the notebook I would take a picture of it and save the file as a PDF. That way I have all of my actions/notes stored electronically. I still kept the physical notebooks however if I lost them or decided to part with them I had the PDF’s. Sometime along the way in May or June I started adding things I had done already to my daily list. Just as an FYI so I knew it happened. After I started doing that I realised if I have all these PDFs of what I did it is a good indication of what happened on that day. I started adding those PDFs to my Day One journal. The OCD in me later realised after a few weeks that my Day One journal would start getting very large in size. Each PDF file was about 250 kB. I already bloat my journal with photos of things that happen on the day. I wanted to avoid adding about 2 MB of size to the journal a week. My solution was to take the hand written notes and write them out into my daily Day One Journal entry. At first it felt like a good idea. Again the act of writing or typing is good for memory or so I have read. Inevitably I grew tired of it. That daily process evolved then into me dictating out what I had written into Dragon Anywhere. I would then paste the dictation into Day One. The thing with dictating was that it was very easy to do. What I had written was very simple and short since when writing I was trying to limit what I wrote to as little as possible yet still trigger my memory. It was hard to say so few words about the topic since dictating was so easy. I found myself starting to elaborate more on each line that I have written. After a few days that turned into a Complete Journal entry of what went on for the day all be it in bulleted format instead of paragraphs. It was still pretty complete. Instead of having to sit and write free form things I thought about for a daily recap I now had an agenda for me to discuss if I want to.

At the time I am writing this I have been journalling in that way for about two weeks. This week I found that I slacked off a little and had to go back to several days and go through the process. Luckily I was able to recall enough of what’s going on by what I wrote. It feels like that I could go several days and not lose that much detail. Any more than that and it’s probably not worth it. I am liking the new style of writing because I have the notebook with me everywhere and using it gives me that physical touch I don not get with just a phone. I can see myself ditching the paper notebook and doing the same thing in an electronic format. Yet for now I do like the old school approach.

I have been putting my daily writing into moleskine notebooks. I am on my third Harry Potter special edition notebooks. I can get about three months worth into a full notebook. The first two notebooks spanned over a year each. At the time I was not writing in them daily. The one I am on now I hope to fill completely from now until sometime in the autumn.

In the same time I have been journalling more I have neglected my blog entries. It is not a conscious decision. I just don’t give myself enough time to write. Since writing for me is dictating in an app I need a quiet place alone to do it. M has said several times that she is okay with me dictating with her around. I am self-conscious about doing it so I do not. The routine I have gotten myself into lets me take my written bullet point journal and dictate it into a Day One entry takes about 5 to 15 minutes depending on how much I decide to elaborate on what I wrote out. That makes it relatively easy to do every day as long as I remember.

The blog on the other hand requires me to think of what I want to talk about. Then I dictate it. From there I do proof read and edit the entries. I have to make a lot of manual typing since the dictation is nowhere near perfect. For a private journal entry its perfectly fine. For something to publish on the internet it does need work after dictating. Once done writing and editing an entry I need to label it and find a suitable photograph to go along with the post. Then it is figuring out what I will post next. I know that I sometimes write a lot and then not at all for long periods of time I limit my posts to once a week. The big question that comes up in my mind when writing something such as this post is how long the lead time between when I write something and when I publish it. In some cases that has been months.

As of the Autumn 2020 this is my process. Since I wrote this post in late summer my process has changed a bit. Since marking that update in the Autumn of 2020 I am still loosely following the same pattern. Before that changed I figured I should finally post this entry before it has its own birthday. I am glad that I am keeping with the routine!

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.

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.

My Decor Choices in the New House, Oh I Mean The Blog Has a New Name

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That picture is the decor of the master bedroom in our new house. Ok maybe not. I am not sure if MC would be cool with that. I really did not ask. If she is then I might totally go for that minus the monolith. Unless the Monolith has a flat screen in it.

The main reason for this post is after I wrote my blog renaming post yet before it was published this Wednesday I came up with what I feel is a great name for this site, A Scott Odyssey.  I have had a few names over the years but have never focused on the name aspect of the site identity.  I have fixated more on the URL and as i have written before i kept coming back to what i am using today.  With my track record in waffling on names and URL’s i may change both in 6 months.

I think “A Scott Odyssey” is something fun and semi descriptive enough.  I also feel that it avoids all the things I highlighted I do not want to do when I renamed. On one hand writing about this is too much technical side of the blog itself however this is the minutia I OCD over. I like the Odyssey part and the play on words from 2001. Life is an Odyssey and this move we are taking is the next Chapter in it. Here is to another 14 years of writing at “A Scott Odyssey”.

Hosting Changes Afoot

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It’s September, so that means hosting provider changes! I don’t know why but both my blog hosting service as well as my general website hosting provider were both setup in September. That means annual fee’s are around the corner, so if i want to make changes i have to do it soon. Well Typepad did have an issue about 2 years ago so I now renew in November for them, but my hosting provider Site5 renews in about a week. I need to decide if i want to renew with them for another year or make changes to my hosting services.

I would like to cut back the amount i am paying for web services so i am thinking about alternatives. I like Site5 but my needs have changed over time. I ended up not using their free setups of linux apps like WordPress. I used Gallery for a while but just recently messed up my config and didn’t really use it enough to warrant the expense. With a blog site like this one on Typepad, having another site is a bit redundant especially if i don’t ever update it. Typepad now offers the ability to setup regular pages on my blog so i might create a version of my regular site here. That means i only have to get an email provider and keep Typepad as my main web presence. I have also been thinking of buying Flickr Pro so i can use it like i was going to use the Gallery application. With the cost of the mail hosting, and Flickr Pro, vs regular hosting with Site5 i am saving a few bucks. I am getting less features, but I am getting better functions out of the features I am using, so I am planning my migration away from Site5. The only thing that takes a little thinking is how to move my mail to a new provider without loosing any mail. Fingers crossed.

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