About Stats Privacy Patreon An overdue chat about everything
2025-10-28, by DrFriendless
As the young people say, it has been a hot minute.
In August 2022 I suspended the Extended Stats system as I had some design flaws that were costing me money (and not even working). I had a plan to fix it, but of course that had to be done in addition to work. Then in early 2023, upon medical advice (“get off the sofa more, John”) I got a dog. His name is Gray.
So, you know, we have been to the park 2000 times since then. That’s not really an exaggeration - he’s just over 1000 days old, and we go to the park on average twice a day. I have definitely been getting off the sofa more.
Some of you may remember I had a job using some of the same technologies I use on this site (more about the tech in other posts). That certainly decreased my enthusiasm for working on the site - it was literally just like work but for no money. But the good news (well, maybe, let’s see) is that I no longer have that job any more so now I’m free to play with technology again!
I’ve had a poke around the code, and implemented the idea I had for fixing the cost problem. That seems to be going OK. Of course in the 3 years since I looked last, all of the code has absolutely rotted - no version of anything is still supported, no upgrade is simple, and my standards have changed a lot. So I’m slowly working through all the code and updating all the bits to something more modern. And, freed from the constraints of clients who need this working yesterday, I’m trying to do it properly.
You may notice this is a new blog. In fact it’s not even a blog, it’s a static site built with a thing called Astro. Alas, WordPress is one of the things that has changed in the last few years, and as it turns out I STILL REALLY HATE IT. So I’m building a new blog into the main site. Astro has a tutorial about how to build a blog, and I read a good two pages of that before I got bored and wandered off to do my own thing. Hopefully over time I will get back to that and get some tips on making the blog more bloggish.
I’m also going to include some technical posts in the blog. If I recall correctly I always did, but one thing I’ve noticed over the years is that technical blog posts sometimes cover salient details that the official documentation leaves out. Some technologies - AWS and Stripe spring to mind - have such overwhelmingly comprehensive documentation that you can’t find the trees for the forest, and I feel it’s a civic duty to point out a few of the quirky trees along the way.
The dog is doing very well, but he does need a lot of attention. We live in a small house with no yard, and although he’s content to lie around and wait while Daddy plays with computers, he gets twitchy after a while. He’s still young, but he can tell from the way Daddy closes the laptop or puts the mouse aside whether it’s time to go to the park or not. If you’d like to follow him on Facebook, he’s got his own account and he’s a friend of mine - his formal name is Grayson. And yes his ear is always like that.
Although I’m getting on a bit in age, I’m not old enough to retire. And furthermore I think if I did I’d find it too easy to turn my brain off and then I’d probably get dementia or something, and we don’t want that. So I guess I will look for another job in the near future - preferably after I’ve got the site working nicely (and cheaply) again. And inevitably that will interfere with my work here.
Well anyway, that’s enough of that. I have technical things to do.
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