Gulp
If you're reading this, it means I finally left the relative safety of wordpress.com, and setup a blog outside the city borders. I'm on my own out here, wondering if I'll survive, and then of course castigating myself for worrying. Of course I'll survive – I used to be a web developer. We'll ignore that I just spent an hour wondering why email notifications were not being sent, before finding them all in my spam folder. There's an irony in that somewhere – that my own email account regards anything from me as spam.
So. I've done it. I pulled the trigger – or plug – or whichever idiom is the correct one for such acts of idiocy. The new blog is being hosted by Digital Ocean (the cheapest host this side of Chickensaw County), the domain is being looked after by Namecheap (who are true to their name), and the SSL certificate – giving you the little padlock in the address bar – is courtesy of a wonderful project called 'Lets Encrypt', that cost me nothing at all.
You might say I'm doing this 'on the cheap'.
The one surviving concession to the WordPress universe is their 'Akismet' service – that weeds spam out of email. I don't particularly want the comments to my blog filled with penis or breast enlargement offers – my daughters already inform me that my 'Man Boobs' are quite impressive enough – on a regular basis.
I'll admit that I'm considering wiring up some kind of statistic tracking – to find out exactly how many people are not visiting – then, should I happen to bump into them, I can stare at them in the most disappointed manner I might muster. I suppose some kind of subscription type thing might be an idea too.
Anyway. It's lovely out here on my private mountain top, honest. Lonely, windy, cold, and dispiriting, but lovely, honest. Everybody should do this (he says, trying to look confident in his own stupidity).