I've added a Telegram Channel today for those who use Telegram Channel. I'm still deciding whether to post headlines only or full posts as I don't want it too cluttered. But anyone can view it at https://t.me/s/gadgeteerza or within Telegram just search for @gadgeteerza to subscribe.

A little before this I had also added the mail subscription which will send a single mail with a day or two's posts in that one mail.

The other options are in the right-side panel on the various pages on this site.

A new page was started at https://gadgeteer.co.za/hamradio about my new hobby from 2019. I've added a page at https://gadgeteer.co.za/winlink about Winlink for sending e-mails over radio without the Internet.

I have managed to transfer and restore the original URL https://gadgeteer.co.za across to the new site so all old links should connect fine now. I'm still checking for any minor bugs or issues but everything seems to be working fine and site is fully functional with Disqus comments etc.

If you used a link say like https://gadgeteer.co.za/blog it will work identically as https://drupal.gadgeteerza.co.za/blog here, but should also redirect to here automatically.

Last night was not a good night... just after I had finished putting the last touches to adding Disqus comments (I'm still trying to remember how I restricted them to only certain pages) I made the big error of disabling two aggregator feed content systems I was no longer using and then also deleted (I should have disabled and backed up) a "feed" item which I thought I was not using. Then it all fell apart as I'd made so many tweaks that the more I tried to re-add the feed item I broke my RSS importer and things went from bad to worse.

For a number of years, I have been publishing all my posts to my own hosted blog (first WordPress and then I migrated it all to Drupal) as insurance against social networks disappearing (which they all will eventually) so I have a good 15,000 to 20,000 posts now which are searchable in one place.
Commenting has been a bit difficult for followers there though as I had to enable registration and later anti-spam measures to keep the spam out. No-one wants to register to make a once-off comment on a site they may not come back to later.

Unfortunately an .htaccess file update yesterday evening broke the SSL loading for my address at https://gadgeteer. Whilst fixing this and checking the SSL I noticed three pages (including Home, Open Source Software, and Reading) that were loading some mixed content (non-https) content and this slowed the loading down a bit and could have popper up warnings on some browsers. I have fixed these so loading should be clean and a bit quicker now.

On the My Blog page I have added an option to subscribe to a daily e-mail with a excerpts of my blog posts for the prior 24 hours.  This may be preferable to some followers who don't want to check the site daily or who do not use a RSS reader.

With Opcache enabled on PHP 7.2 the site should now navigate much faster.

I have created a dedicated room on Riot.im at https://chat.librenet.co.za/#/room/#gadgeteerza:librenet.co.za where my blog posts will also be appearing, and anyone can comment or post there.