You might be wondering why this post title begins with “#5395”, and the short answer is that I got into the habit of numbering my journal posts back when I used LiveJournal, and now that I’ve migrated everything over to my own blog I might as well continue the habit. Although, my last post over there was numbered #5354, and this one is 40 posts past that in sequence. I can’t really explain the discrepancy, only that I remember having to do some rough count of my posts back when I originally started numbering them with post #996, and I can’t remember if I didn’t renumber any I later deleted, or if my numbering is off, or what. All I know is, now that I’ve imported all my old journal entries into WordPress and combined them with my existing WordPress posts, WordPress says that I have 5,394 posts in total. Which makes this #5395.

We’ll have to see if other habits make their way over as well. I had the habit of writing all of my posts over there in all lowercase – partly out of laziness, partly because it lent itself to more off-the-cuff writing for me to just get thoughts out of my head and through my fingers and out into the world – but considering how sloppy that feels on a more public-facing site I doubt that’s something I’ll continue.

Anyway. I migrated my journal from there to here, “here” being my old Mac Mini from 2009 that didn’t have a working optical drive or speaker and a hard drive that I upgraded when I replaced the hard drive in my MacBook Pro. I sent it away to macminicolo a few months ago and it’s been working like a champ as my own colocated machine. Originally I set it up using OS X Server to do all of the work, but now the only thing that I specifically use Server.app for is for hosting my VPN access and for configuring my DNS records on the machine. Everything else I’ve set up using Homebrew: Apache, PHP, MariaDB, OpenSSL, etc., although it was a bit confusing at first – for some reason, PHP kept downgrading my OpenSSL version when I was installing, and the trick was to use --build-from-source all the time. The nice thing about this setup is that by avoiding the Apple-included versions I don’t have to worry that something they upgrade will break my setup, and all I need to do to keep my stuff up-to-date is to run brew doctor && brew update && brew upgrade. I even had the forethought to create a script that runs the brew doctor and brew update commands once a week and sends me a Boxcar notification as to whether there are any updates or not that week. Migrated my WordPress blog from my previous hosting service (it wasn’t that I had any major complaints with them or anything, but I already had the machine and wanted the experience, and also wanted to actually own my data).

It’s funny, the things you think of when you decide you want to own your data and the server it sits on. Things like the Snowden NSA revelations, that LiveJournal is now owned by a Russian company, that who knows what might happen with the site considering Russia / Ukraine tensions and sanctions, that perhaps because of circumstances such as those and the long-term prospects for data access it just might not be such a hot idea to keep my writings from the past 13 years on servers out of my control. Things like that. But now that I’m responsible for server maintenance, backups, etc., if anything happens to my data, I have only myself to blame which is totally awesome. At least it has me thinking critically about how to fix things if things go bad!