This year has gone by really quickly. It's the last day of June and this is my first post for the year. I'm going to try and post more frequently but it's been really busy.
The blog has changed hosting locations a couple of times in the past year even without posts. I moved it once from one virtual Rackspace environment to another when I upgraded the O/S and then again a few months ago, moving from a Wordpress blog on Rackspace to a Wordpress blog on DigitalOcean. Finally, I've just moved from a Wordpress blog on DigitalOcean to running as a Ghost blog on DigitalOcean.
Rackspace was taking too much time blocking IP addresses mostly from China, but increasingly from other Rackspace addresses. I didn't subscribe to their (expensive) managed services, but I felt that Rackspace should have done a better job blocking and cleaning up their systems and when I started to get hack attempts from other Rackspace provided addresses, one of which did break into my (outgoing) email server I had enough.
I figured it was time to look around, found DigitalOcean with their virtual servers, SSD drives, costing significantly less per month for hosting and I moved, immediately. It took only a couple of hours to move and a day or two to test that everything was working but it was pretty easy.
As part of my move I shutdown the comment system and removed all but two of the Wordpress plugins. It was a plugin that the skiddie exploited to send out spam mail from the server, but I was also looking to replace Wordpress which I was beginning to feel was way too much overhead for a simple blog and being the 800lb Gorilla in the blogging world it was also becoming a maintenance pain staying updated and ahead of the hackers. So, I started looking at static pages and then into alternative blogging platforms and that's why this is now a Ghost blog.
I've moved over the blog and most of the links are adjusted but you may run across some quirks in older posts. I would say leave me a comment if you find something weird but that ain't happening anytime soon.
Ghost isn't perfect, it is improving, but there is no comment system (I wouldn't use it anyway); search is non-existent, and indexing or a TOC for posts is barely functional. On the other hand it is wicked fast responsive and fairly easy to use. I'm even using a "custom theme" that I modified for the blog, something that I gave up on in Wordpress.