I started this whole shebang, just e-mailing and doing a single page newsletter, hardly a step above a “zine,” before the internet was The Net.
While I started as an undergraduate in Arizona, doing penance, the regular monthly didn’t catch on, or rather properly catch my attention until years later in old Austin.
I circulated that monthly as an e-mail for a half-dozen years, and over 25 years ago, the weekly hatched.
That “Pluto conjoin natal Sun” (inspired) near-death experience? June, 1998? The fallout, an obvious shift in my work, and the incipient point for the birth of the nascent online “web journal” that became a weblog, and eventually, by November of that year? The web journal was petty much daily.
Hand-rolled. With the proper tools, it was relatively easy to write and upload raw HTML (basic web).
Premeditated Shift
Over the years, I’ve used the blog as an experimental area, test theories, web construction, delivery, and display. Test commentary, too. Longer form, shorter form, all experimental.
It has lived on a variety formats, in a number of locations, and so far, it concurrently includes parts of the original astrofish.net/xenon, a location for a dozen years, but under three or four different motors, then I pushed it all over to SkyFriday.com, only to reel that back in to astrofish.blog, which, due to the price of the domain name itself, quickly became astrofish.net/blog, and during the last hosting swap, I moved all of that to KramerWetzel.com, rolling up two older sites, a brief London blog, astrofish.co.uk, and even importing into the mess, my long-standing side project, BexarCountyLine.com. Currently, my inventory of names is down to a handful.
Always recommend Register4Less.com.
Hosting environments change and shift, and I am always seeking the optimal, usually a balance between performance and economy. I would prefer performance, but I have to tend to a bottom line. The last time I went with performance over economy, the increase wasn’t noticeable. Some metrics don’t scale.
Premeditated Shift
Close on the tails (and tales) of the original web hobbyists, I looked at a self-homemade hosting arrangement but quickly opted for a remote host. Think: a simple residential power outage would shut it down, self-home hosted.
Over the years, the servers have changed, but the URL stayed the same, about the only constant I’ve had. Different IP addresses, but the same URL. That means? Search functions find me, every time. Names are the same, two items to seek: astrofish.net or just my name, Kramer Wetzel.
Structurally, that’s what this next, premeditated shift is about. It’s about structure and what structures I’ll have in place. Take all that web material, sort it, store it, and make it available, as much for me, as for anyone else, and keep in a single spot.
The structure itself? It needs to be slightly separate from astrofish.net — differentiate between the two. Why the idea of the blog — like astrofish.net/blog or astrofish.net/xenon — is no longer effective. My web wanderings tend to defy any kind of a category, hewing to the original ideal of the web being a free space to experiment. While no longer technically “product,” the horoscopes are but one kind of a thing, and there’s that. Store them in one place — one container for the horoscopes.
I prefer to keep musing, images, and related writing, astrological, fictive, or other, all on a separate space. Easier, cleaner.
Premeditated Shift
The Premeditated Shift is scheduled the end of the year, two and half years into a three year contract with one hosting provider. As good a time as any, and part of the great pandemic concatenation process.
Instead of quickly ripping a bandaid off, though, this is a gradual process with enough time to update what needs to be updated, before just flipping a switch.
From a web perspective, it helps to have the the two on separate servers, separate hosts with different IP addresses as that looks like proper pointers. However, from a billing and “paying for this” sense, a single hosting account with two URLs is easier to mange, and costs less.
Premeditated Shift
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Premeditated Shift
The shift will occur, it will be painless, damn near transparent, unseen, but makes life easier with fewer moving parts. There’s a reason I’m a generalist not a specialist.
“A lot of work goes into making this look easy.”