I feel the need for a change…

… Not me. This website. Or whatever we call blogs these days to make ourselves relevant and funky in the “what a time to be alive” Web 3.0 ecosystem*. Anyway ‘we‘ have a symbiotic relationship the electronic hedgy and I. It stands ready to receive yet more half arsed shit from yours truly, before serving it up to those desperately short of content and purpose in their life.

That’s all going to change. Not the ‘Incoherent ramblings of an idiot‘ as the on-the-nose strap-line promised from day one. That’s a feature not a bug. No, the occasionally desultory tossing a page to a passing browser thing. The site has been generously hosted by a mate for the last fifteen years, but now he’s keen to get his own life back.

Woooah. BACK RIGHT UP THERE FELLA. Ten years and another five? Sure you can’t actually kill electrons and the flickering pulse of hosting power is hardly contributing to the climate emergency***, but even so we’re talking about 180 months of writing about riding bikes and other unimportant stuff! No one of ! isn’t enough. I think fuck and !!! might cover it.

That is a lot. Quality and Quantity. Yeah they both start with Q. One may have won out. Although not so much in the last few years. No issue with writers block when your muse is a city of ten million fuckwits attempting to splatter you onto the tarmac. And a daily train journey caught between not much internet access and much needed middle aged naps.

Now, it’s when I can be arsed/can type after a few beers/can remember a great idea from ten minutes ago that has now left the cerebral building. And all is not well back in that hinterland of four posts a week. Broken links, UTF****, pictures not displaying, questionable copyright when they do. Yeah, there be dragons, best leave it alone.

I can’t leave the hosting alone tho. Andy – said mate – has gone above and beyond hosting (and amusingly paying for it -at least I’ve recompensed him now) a few bottom feeding sites lapping in the surf of that global internet thing. So it’s the right time for the prickly fella to be dropped into a virtual cannon and punted hyperbolically across cyberspace.

I did consider hosting it on the website that represents me as a working adult. Clearly that’s beyond risky. I mean two articles in and it’d go all Jerry Maguire only with a more realistic ending of shelf stacking.  So in a sideways move, it’s crash landing on the platform best defined by ‘lowest cost bidder‘. A hosting side lamented for ‘suffering performance degradation under load‘.

I think, dear readers, that IS a risk we can safely take. All 23 of us. Longer term, because, honestly it’s not like I’m busy or anything, I intend to bring the Prickly Pickly back in house. That diagram up there was my half arsed attempt at formalising a plan based on state of the art network design knowledge from 25 years ago. Bored of that, I’m going my with Standard-Operating-Procedure of winging it, while pretending the smoking ruins of Raspberry PI’s and paper thin security was the plan all along.

We’ll get back to that. At some point. It’s on my list of retirement projects. No that’s not true, it’s not on any list because we’ve decided the correct response to both offspring moving out is to entirely remodel the house. From the roof down. I feel that whole writer’s block thing may not be an issue for a couple of years. Assuming we’ve still got access to electricity, and the village isn’t flooded.

As I write this, internet address books are being updated, database clone wars have reached a peaceable settlement, and the hedgehog cannon ball is arcing on a ballistic trajectory to its new home. That is probably overall a good thing because, while I’m not under any illusion the over 1,000 (I know, really I mean what have I been doing with my life?) articles would be any loss to critical literature, I’d kind of miss that narrative of my life.

Which is hard to reconcile with the last backup being 2018 before last night 😉 Again I have to thank Andy for keeping the lights on when nobody was home.

So what’s next? More of the same, less of something different? No idea, but for £12 a year I think we’ll keep buggering on. In the short term, we might go offline but even I probably won’t notice. Wonder if I can get one of those animated GIFS with a builders hat?

*I remember the fourth age of computing. It was the “information age”. Taught to me about 1989 – all about the data. Web 1,2 and 3 appear to have been mostly about animating cats in ever more sophisticated ways, and porn**

**I am not being entirely serious of course. But God I feel old. I remember being excited about animated GIFS!

***Looking at you and glowering darkly Bitcoin.

****Don’t go there. I won’t bore you with what it stands for. If you find yourself lost in about 2008 posts, think of it as Ugly Tilde Font. Or Unknowable Text Fuckup 🙂

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