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.

I have set Viewport settings on my site for mobile devices so hope this will improve page scaling and rendering for mobile devices.

Note though that images are rendered to fit on the screens, so if you are viewing in portrait mode and the photo is a landscape photo, it may appear a bit skewed or squashed to fit. What I find works well for this (as a workaround unless I can find a better solution) is to rotate the mobile device to landscape mode which renders the photo fine.  I will anyway try and use a squarer format for photos in future which should render much better.

Some downtime today between 14:00 to 15:00 whilst the site was being upgraded. The upgrade is finished and looks like everything is working fine.

For some odd reason, I noticed yesterday that this whole page had disappeared along with the video module (that displays embedded video for that page) was disabled. Yet the original static picture image was in its upload directory. Also, all my cPanel backup files had disappeared.... Yet the other recent additions all seemed to be in place. So I have rebuilt that page and it is back at https://gadgeteer.co.za/solar.

The menu now shows an option (far right) to see site related news (such as this!). There are now two RSS feeds that can be subscribed to for up to date news on either all my blog posts or the site news. There are links to both feeds at the bottom of the My Blog and Site Updates pages. The sidebar on the right of each page has an RSS subscribe button for the blog posts.

The Follow Me box on the right sidebar has also had its links converted to buttons.