I have set the blog to require registration before you can comment. Apologies. It’s an experiment to see if this will help me manage the egregious amounts of spam I’m getting (even with akismet’s help). If it doesn’t help I’ll turn it off again, but to give you some context, in 12 hours I received 17 pages of spam!
Category: Site
Things specific to the GCW websites and related technologies
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https
I decided I wanted to be able to log in and post from outside my home network, and using vanilla http to do that while running on unencrypted wifi at the coffee shop was just asking for trouble.
Thankfully, Let’s Encrypt has made setting up https on your site both easy and, more importantly, free!
The “wonders” of how my old install of WP was set up has meant that older posts may still have bogus links in them, but on the front page (and going forward) at least, you now see:
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GCW gets a new home
After many years of running Great Castle Wilson on some flavour of Mac, I’ve finally decided to give it dedicated hardware of its own. In part, this is because I enjoy proving to myself that I can still set up and configure a webserver and all the other required accoutrements — yes, I’m weird like that — but mostly it’s because I’m fairly confident that macOS Catalina is going to break my current configuration anyway, so it seemed like a good time to make a change.
For those who aren’t aware, Catalina is the first version of macOS that only supports 64-bit applications. There are some fairly significant changes under the covers, and the odds are low that my personal mix of random open source software and existing Mac tech is going to continue to work.
So without further ado, here is the brand new GCW:
Yep, it’s a Pi 🙂
Specifically:
So far the setup process has been relatively painless, but I did learn that WordPress does *not* like it when its API URL points at a different instance of WordPress than the one that’s making the request — that took a couple of hours to debug. 🙂
Anyway, if you can read this, then we’re live. The site seems quite responsive and the only posts that aren’t displaying properly are ones where some of the original content they linked to no longer exists
Welcome!
Some history…
I don’t post to NfGCW very often any more, but I love the fact that there’s years of history from our family here. I’ve blogged about many topics over the years, including the site itself. Here are some previous posts about the hardware GCW ran on.
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Apologies
I realize the site has been down for a couple of days. Things continue to be quite complex/random here.
Thanks to those who let me know. Apologies again for the downtime.
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A new machine, a new era.
Just a quick note to say that I have upgraded to a new machine. I had been using a Mac Mini to host GCW for many years, but the hard drive in the old beast is starting to sound like the gerbils are getting tired, and I thought it was time.
I know no one would guess I had given up on the Mac universe, so without further ado, here is the new beast…
It’s a 27″ iMac, with the 3.5 GHz i7 and the upgraded graphics chip (780M w. 4Gig of RAM). I must say, it is amazing. It’s actually fast enough to play PC games under Parallels with completely acceptable framerates even at high detail levels.
And so, it’s the end of an era: I am getting rid of my gaming PC. I’m also getting rid of the Mac Mini I was using for the server, and the MBP I was using for music. Believe it or not, at the end of this process, I will have just the one iMac in my home office, plus a station to hold my work laptop when I bring it home. I’m not sure how long I can stand it, but that’s the plan.
In any case, I have once again transplanted Great Castle Wilson to new hardware. This move was more difficult than previous ones, since (for some unknown reason) I was unable to load the mysql database directly by importing the records from the old site. Instead I had to use the export/import capabilities built into WordPress, which at least appear to have been successful. This is the first time I’ve tried this though, so if you see anything wrong/missing, please let me know.
One note: So far of all the old blogs on GCW I have only gotten this one going. I don’t think the others get many visitors, but I will get around to moving them eventually.
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Woo hoo! GCW is a Maverick!
Yup. I upgraded the Mac Mini to Mavericks. Amazingly, it went almost flawlessly. A little bit of confusion with some file permissions and the need to re-enable PHP again, but that was it.
I’m sure there are a bunch of lurking issues that still need to be resolved, but this blog, and the old content from Deb’s “deblog” both came back, which is really what I cared about the most. Note: If you’re looking for updates from Deb, she now uses the blog attached to her Shopify account.
The rest I can work through as I find them.
Nothing like giving the old Mac Mini a new lease on life to make your day. 🙂
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A theme away, A theme away,…
I upgraded to the latest wordpress and ended up with a completely trashed theme. This is just the standard “2011” theme. It will do until I can find something better. One of these days I’ll get around to doing my own.
(note to self: Orion needs a project type for creating wordpress themes.)
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*** Site stability warning *** (updated)
Just letting you know that the various sites we host may be unstable for the next few days.
We’ve just upgraded our network connection, which should significantly improve performance, but it’s going to take a while to get all the kinks worked out.
Wish me luck :-),
McQ.Update: The most important sites are all working again. If you have any problems, please let me know.
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WP Upgrade Blues
*Whew*. That’s what I get for blithely doing what I usually do when upgrading between wordpress versions. This time I was left with a very messed up page, and more than half of my plugins and themes reporting errors. Ugh. There were even error messages when updating the mysql db. Double ugh.
I’ve bashed it back into an approximation of working for now, using the included “twentyten” theme. Now I have to see if I can figure out whether anything else got wrecked.