Well, after a few months of break and pondering, I’ve decided that, yes, I do miss having a blog platform. And, given that, plus some time off over the normal winter shutdown, I decided to actually get off my rear and figure things out. Which, you may notice, I have!

My blog is now self hosted, for handwaving values of self hosted that are, at least, flexible in the future should hosting need to change. I’m still using cloud services, but they’re now optional, instead of a required part of the blog (and, mostly, my home upload bandwidth is terrible these days - worse than usual). I’ve figured out comments as you may notice, and that includes driving traffic towards my forum I’m trying to spin up over at https://conversation.sevarg.net - join, post, engage.

Random short updates:

• Solar is done, online, and producing power in meaningful amounts, though far from enough to power our house through the winter.

• My office also has more solar panels on it, as pictured above. Yes, I have a 5.2kW system on my office now.

• The year 2020 is over. How’d you do? Don’t expect immediate changes, either.

• I am, as a perhaps unwise decision, handling some new streaming infrastructure for our church, which I’ll be posting about in weeks to come.

It’s going to take some time to get my head wrapped around the new workflow, and I’m not sure what posting schedule I’m going to be using for now - probably every other week, though I’ve enjoyed the productivity of not having to write stuff lately, and I may just post as I have content again. The whole “trying to make a living blogging” thing didn’t work at all, so, I’m happy with it being a somewhat regularly updated personal blog. Ads are gone, tracking is gone, and while I may put something in place to count page hits and referrers (useful to find out who’s linked my stuff), I may not. I’m good with the concept of a publish-only platform, and as I’m engaging with the internet less, well… I care less about where I’m getting linked, or even if I am.

So, I’ll try this for now. Comments should be working if you sign up for Conversation, and otherwise, let me know what bugs you find in the site. I’m sure there are plenty.