Some pages removed
Some pages have been completely removed during the merge and reconstruction of the Wild Tech “Garden” and Daniel F. Dickinson (Website) formerly at https://www.danielfdickinson.ca.
Most, however, have been brought over to the new combined site. The change is part of my attempt to reduce to amount of time I spend on web development as well as writing content. I am reducing from four sites to two and will be using the same theme for both. I was also dissatisfied with some aspects of the themes I was using (in terms of properly following W3C specifications, using Hugo well, and avoiding unnecessary Javascript).
Where possible removed pages have been redirected to a relevant alternative on the site, or for a couple of pages, to this page. I have hopefully avoided creating 404 (Page not found) issues for any pages during the move.
I took advantage of the merge which is being combined with a change of hosting provider (to Azure Blog Storage combined with Azure CDN). I’ve made this choice for a few reasons, not the least learning that my current provider Netlify is hosted on Google Cloud. In addition, I’ve been concerned I’ve been tying myself too tightly to the Netlify ’tooling’ and decided to make sure that my testing an processes were easily transferable.
Ironically for my desktop I have switched back to Linux, mostly because on the less powerful machine I have (my laptop), Windows 10 was just waaaayyyy too slow. I also don’t have any devices suitable for Windows 11 and I don’t want to be using an OS that will be getting less and less ’love’ over time as Microsoft pushes everyone towards a version of Windows that ‘was never going exist’ (ref: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/05/08/microsoft-windows-10-last-windows/, and see also: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/11/why-microsoft-is-releasing-a-new-version-of-windows.html).
It was actually quite easy to make the switch because I tend to choose cross platform applications and technologies over ones that leave me tied into a particular vendor. As I noted that is also a factor in my decision to move away from Netlify’s tooling.
And of course, with Netlify since I was using the free tier, I have had to wonder how Netlify makes money on people hosting websites on their service. As they say, “If you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product” — except I think it’s even worse, I think it is a case where it’s visitors to my website who were the product, even if I’m not sure how.