So that’s two entire things done from my infamous to-do list: I had to put my sites (and specifically my mother’s site – gerdateljeur.com) on SSL, and also write a blog post (I’ll revisit the infamous to-do list some other time). I’ve also had a look at my drafts, which stretch back years, since I’ve had a long-running habit of starting blog posts, outlining my ideas for writing them, and then not actually writing them. The drafts are not things I can publish as they are, but just sketches of what I would have intended them to be, still in need of flowery language, turns of phrase and interesting, readable detail. The difference between a PowerPoint slide and something that you’d enjoy reading for its own sake, albeit without the lengthy, tedious meeting before and after to discuss the reasons for looking at a projector.

I had a follow-on post to ‘On not having Asperger’s’ sketched out, and a post about the collapse of my marriage. Now, I’m glad that I wrote the outline about the collapse of my marriage because with the passage of time, I’ve forgotten some of the details, and yet here they are in vivid, searingly angry detail. I was actually stunned on reading it, and I’m sort of glad that I didn’t complete and publish it. This sort of thing can have a real impact in these situations.

I’ll close out with a couple of snippets from the bullet-point list of writing points from that post (uncorrected):

• Conversation deathmatch (Eric, who thinks he asking for what kind of toiletpaper to buy, versus Kangor the Belligerent, undefeated winner of 2,000 sudden death matches!)
• I saw Artie at Eflow in a whole new light when I realised what was happening. I wasn’t thinking “Ha, what an idiot!”, I was thinking “Oh shit, that must have been soul-destroying!”

I had a dream early this morning, which was vivid and had as its premise an interesting scenario. I was on a coach (it was one of the scenarios that happens near the Dublin docklands, vaguely) with a number of other people and apparently I had signed up to do some evening work of some sort. It was undefined, but possibly difficult and it would take 8 hours or so, late at night and into the early hours, somewhere out of the city, and there was some sort of handler or contact on the bus. I ended up sitting next to him. I was saying the direction of the bus to memorise where it was going, and he was unhappy about this, and told me to stop, so I kept muttering and other things besides.

I was aware that wherever we were going, we couldn’t leave, it was remote, and also the pay wasn’t defined. This all felt wrong. Just then, on the other side of the road, I saw a number 39 bus – a bus I could take to go home! So I called to driver and demanded to pull over and let me off. He complained that the luggage compartment was locked, that he couldn’t get my stuff out, but I had it all with me on the bus! So he pulled over at a filling station and I raced off, and so did everyone else, they realised that they didn’t want to do it either! The driver and the handler guy were very unimpressed, but resigned to it.

No, I don’t know what this means. It may be a metaphor for something, but… I don’t know what.

Since this is of interest to some people, here is what my technical problem was, and what I did to resolve it: I’ve had – for many years – my hosting with Blacknight, web and email. It’s a decent package, a finite number of sites and domains for an annual fee. It’s reliable, and I don’t need high performance. However, what I have needed is SSL certs, the now ubiquitous padlock that you see in your browser address bar, which indicates that your communication with the site you are looking at is secure. This is something that until now, web hosting companies have been able to charge a lot of money for, and I can’t justify that for a set of personal sites. What I need are SSL certs from a company called Let’s Encrypt which are free, the only catches being that you need to replace them every three months (this is usually automated), and hosting companies don’t like them because they are free. Natually, Blacknight doesn’t support Let’s Encrypt.

So after much procrastination (and propelled, as noted previously, by displacement behaviour) I took the jump and ordered a VPS hosting package from OVH. VPS hosting means that I get a blank virtual computer somewhere (in this case from a French company called OVH) and set up everything myself, which is normally provided by the hosting company. I have become a web hosting company, in other words. This isn’t a problem! This is something that I do myself all the time, as a job and also as a hobby, because I don’t get out enough and have interests like a real boy would do.

I installed the required software for web hosting, the firewall, a control panel (so that I have a web interface to what is happening on the server and to set things up) and repointed the DNS, which is the addressing for where to find things on the web. I left my email on its existing hosting with Blacknight because I don’t want to get into hosting email myself; this is trickier than web hosting, and can be destructive if I make mistakes. This all took a few hours and I’d love to say that the second site went even more quickly, but the opposite was true and it all took much longer. Having done all that, I then ran into performance problems, regretted the entire project, solved the performance problems, and now I have one remaining (highly esoteric) issue to solve and I can say that I am truly the master of my own web destiny. Or at least a moderately competent webmaster.

Don’t try this at home. Actually, I could have literally tried this at home; I have a number of Raspberry Pi computers at home (the famous €65 barebones computer), and I could have hosted the sites myself, on one of those, from my home broadband connection. Any one of them would have been a lot more powerful than the VPS that I’ve rented, and with much more free space. So why not do that? Reliability. I couldn’t guarantee uptime, the availability of the server and the sites on it to the world. There are many things that can go wrong, between my patchy router uptime, power, the server software itself not being so reliable on Raspberry Pi, and I’d like the server to be something that I can just forget about.

This ‘back to blogging’ exercise is something which I had planned, on and off, for 8 years. Better late than never, I suppose. It has been on my to-do list, and coupled with a need to get all of the sites that I look after under SSL (the increasingly ubiquitous padlock that we see in our browser address bars – secure browsing), I spent this weekend setting up new web hosting from scratch and moving my sites to that, instead of doing any of the other – arguably more important – things that I should have been doing.

I call this constructive procrastination, where as a displacement activity, I get something else done instead of what I should have been doing; the energy is not wasted, and someone, somewhere gets something out of it.

I can’t say that it went smoothly, but I am pleased to say that while there are a great number of things that I’m terrible at, including a number things that are probably important to being a functioning member of society, setting up and fine-tuning a web server isn’t one of them. Nginx, PHP, and WordPress (and I really, truly hate PHP), from a standing start. I even impressed myself; I should do this for a living.

I’m at it again. I’ve moved my long-suffering blog to a new server in a weekend project I’ve called ‘Longform’, so that I can basically write longer Twitter posts on my own blog, which is where I should really be doing that kind of thing anyway. I enjoy the brevity of writing tweets, the challenge and the thrill of throwing something out to the world (not that anyone particularly reads what I write) in 280 characters or less, or building a narrative over a number of tweets. The thing is, it really is an open forum, and my tweets can individually land in someone’s timeline, shorn of all context, and what might be a running joke in my mind will take on a different intent for someone else. I’m not saying that I’ll avoid it here, but maybe I’ll take a little more time and craft something a little more considered when I’m doing it here.

And I’ll be able to edit. I hope that I’ll avoid that and get it mostly right first time. We’ll see. If nothing else, it’ll keep me off Twitter more, creating my own stories and outlining ideas and venting in my own space.