Cha-cha-Changes
Another year, more lessons learned, and leaning into it.
I’ve toyed with ideas, and I’ve used sketched out notes to help me remember what the direction is I’m trying to go. What works, and what doesn’t work. What allows for the creative urges I got, and what is more simple and straightforward. Linear, artistic, room to grow, expansion and contraction.
Entropy.
Entropy is a universal constant. Have to check with science guys for that.
The goal, started several years back, but the goal was to get it all under a single roof. That hasn’t happened. But I did have sketch of way to do so it could all be combined into a more succinct container or just singular discrete environment.
The drawing, done sometime in the last year, but undated, shows two distinct containers. One is dynamic, the astrofish.net box. Probably a blog-motor, and more than likely just a simple WordPress install, and the other, KramerWetzel.com, also a simple WordPress instance, but mostly just static material. Bio – contact – archives – pointers (hotlinks).
I’ve experimented with spinning off the blog as its own URL, and that’s worked, after a fashion, but it’s all on a single, shared server, so it all comes from the same IP address, and that means the search and point function is denigrated. Same IP address? It’s only fair.
Cha-cha-Changes
Decades back, I spun the various blogs into their own domains, but coming from shared servers didn’t do a lot for the SEO juice, not that I care one whit about that. From a technical point, though, I’d like to get the blog and the horoscopes on the same instance of a WordPress installation, and as I’m going, at the moment, it will be a separate install, but on the same URL, and one that I used before.
As a past part of this experiment, I leased the name astrofish.blog, but that was frightfully expensive, and showed zero results in search or traffic. Noble experiment. Failed, but a quantitative “good try.” Think it lasted less than a year.
My standard advice, after more than three decades with this kind of material?
“Get a domain name, a single name, like your name, then put up a “business card” place holder, and hang a blog off to one side. The web and search engines reward original, cogent, fresh content, hence the weblog, and the name? When someone looks for me, what’s the first hit? My own name.”
There’s a secondary piece that I’ve learned, in the years living online, growing up, in full view on the web, and it goes back to older media studies. Most of what is about me, or contains my name, is by me. The negative material is buried under what I let loose.
Cha-cha-Changes
The technical side is to get it all dumped into a single database, a single installation of a blog motor, likely WordPress. Single installation, a simple database with two threads and two different front ends. The most important, it would seem, is the front-facing horoscopes. After 30 years, I don’t think they are going away any time too soon, for whatever reason. The other is the weblog. Blog. Daily miscellany and wanderings, mental droppings of a fevered mind. That’s at a quarter of a century and almost have it all in one spot, now.
The technical side is easier. Smoother, nicer, kinder, and for me? Most important? Easier to maintain. Less mental overhead.
It takes a lot of work to get to where this is simple and easy.
In the waning months of the last year, fraught with evil, evil-doers, turbulence, and world turmoil, the simplest action on my part, try to spread a little joy, still, in an ongoing process?
All any of us can hope for.
Cha-cha-Changes
Should be a seamless transition, having done this a time or two before.
Cha-cha-Changes
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Recommended domain name registry (really are good).
