What, another blog? Ok, well, this may just be the last one for several reasons, at least one of which is my age vs the average TTL of a blogging platform, only this time the blog is here, on my desk, running on a rpi4B, so it isn’t likely to include my posts from previous blogs such as https://blog.teledyn.com or https://teledyn.wordpress.com although I won’t rule out the latter, but imports never really worked, did they? WP made a total mess of my old Posterous site, and then BlogSpot made a final mangle taking from WP (because Posterous direct to Blogger wasn’t an option).
And while I thought this would be easy to do in 2023, it wasn’t. It took hours. And why? It is the usual: documentation online is a hodge-podge of obsoletes, as are, sadly, many current Ubuntu packages. For example, the apt package for wordpress is older than the apt package for PHP, and the errors this mismatch generates are opaque, misleading, and greeted with abuse by the forums where they chant RTFM only there is no defacto current manual and what is there is false. The distro package looked clever, with per-site configs and all, but I don’t care how clever your package may be, if it doesn’t install, it’s wrong.
The correct strategy, which is often given as third-party advice and, interestingly enough, also given by the Ubuntu discourse pages, is to grab the latest tarball and do it all by hand just like in the good old days.
So why subject myself to such abuse? Although the ActivityPub in WP is currently primative, it is far better than in Nextcloud, so it’s a stand-in for running a Fediverse presence (which may someday subsume mstdn.ca and the others), and because it is behind the router, xmlrpc becomes an option, which means the emacs org2blog becomes an option, which could be very useful. Living on the same hardware as both Radio Teledyn and NAS, perhaps it can share resources, although that may be blocked by how NAS protects its files.
For the moment, and maybe going forward, this is tucked under RTFM-89.8 simply so https will work using the certificate it shares with NAS. Adding another was more than I wanted to do right now, but as a result, being a sub-path, I had a thoughtful correspondent nudge me to RTFM and lo, here we are..
