Daniel F. Dickinson's Blog

If you’ve been wondering why I haven’t posted in a long time: “I have been up to tech!”

Some pages have been completely removed during the merge and reconstruction of The Wild Tech “Garden” and Daniel F. Dickinson (Website)

With browsers having built-in “Open link in new tab” functionality, it doesn’t make sense to break a basic web idiom (the back button) on a whim. Auto-opening link in a new tab/window breaks the back button and is unnecessary (because users have the ability to make that choice for themselves).

One of the lessons I’ve learned over the last few years is to relax and let others do what they do better than I. For instance, I recently updated my ‘introduction card’ (aka business card), but this time instead of designing it myself, I decided to rely on the professional designer at the Midland Copy Shoppe. I am very glad that I did, and I will show you why.

It seems I’m doing more front-end web work than is ideal these days. I say that because I tend to prefer technical aspects of web development…

This is true despite the fact that I am moving my websites (including this one) away from OVHcloud and/or self-hosting, and am making a shift to using Microsoft 365. Some will never believe that nor accept what I have to say about it, but for me it’s the right decision.

While our internal tests (using private data that would need to be replaced with dummy data) of a full config were successful, frustrations with ‘our’ OpenStack hosting provider has led to the conclusion that it’s not a viable cloud alternative for us. In addition, is our finding that this approach involves more effort than if Terraform were a viable option, so if we were to continue with public cloud infrastructure we would prefer services with which we can successfully use Terraform.

I’ve been experimenting with Terraform to manage a number of Public Cloud Infrastructure instances (virtual machines) on OVHcloud. I hit an issue that affects both OVH API and OpenStack API on OVH. For OpenStack on OVH there are ‘Resource Not Found’ issues which seem to be experienced by others as well. For the OVH Terraform provider plugin there are issues with id’s being changed.

I’ve ended up doing some frontend web design after all, and have also enjoyed working with the Hugo static website generator.

So far the upshot of this is to not expect a simple Export/Import process with WordPress, especially when it comes to the Media Library, if one wants to rebuild a site at the same domain, rather than a domain move, with the previous domain still active.