Both StatCounter and the Twitter integration (it displayed my latest Tweets and allowed a click to follow) were removed from my site. These were potentially two external sites which could track visitors across my site as well as elsewhere.

Along with removing Disqus Commenting and now Google Analytics, my site is way cleaner of trackers and 3rd party cookie monitoring. See from https://themarkup.org/blacklight?url=gadgeteer.co.za where I had over 30 before it is right down to 1 ad tracker and two 3rd party cookies. The culprits now are mainly the Twitter module to display my latest tweets (and likely the option for visitors to subscribe to my Tweets) and StatCounter.

Rather more complicated than I thought so took a day and five hours in the end.  For some reason the Drupal was split into two databases with two config settings.php files which I only realised much later. Any both the Drupal and Hubzilla sites are up and I'll be running updates a bit later after I have also got the remainder of my sites up.

I am back with Digital Ocean VPS as it really gives more control than a cPanel hosting. My last provider claimed Drupal update was failing because it wanted more than 2 GB of RM... we'll see, but I really doubt it.
 

Due to concerns about tracking and privacy I decided to deactivate the Disqus comments. They were super convenient (seeing I did not have to handle registrations and spam) but they embed trackers and there are issues with them. I don't have funding to pay for a similar externally managed privacy service, so I'm back to no comments for now below posts. I could reactivate Drupal's own commenting system but that means lots of time vetting registrations and spam again, so I'm not keen on that right now.

Anyone searching for my very old webpages from pre-Drupal days will now see a link to the page for Wayback Machine on the Page Not Found error page, if that page was previously saved. I've tested it with some commonly searched for old links and it does work. The Wayback Machine link will only show on the error page if the page was saved.

Site was down for 15 mins at 19:30 UTC while I upgraded my hosting from 1 vCPU to 2 vCPU as CPU had been bottlenecking at times for up to 5 mins. Hope this improves the loading and throughput a bit for now.

I'm planning to maybe move the whole hosting to another hosting provider where for the same cost I can double the storage space and quad triple the RAM... all addresses etc will stay the same but it may have some glitches while I switch over the domain pointing.

Noticed quite a few images were 2MB and one even 8MB in size and they are all reduced to 200KB to 400KB so hopefully pages will load a bit quicker.

I ran some extension updates yesterday and noted that there was an error when running the database update afterwards, but as my admin portal view was working fine I had not checked the public pages. Only realised this morning when I needed to link to a blog post that it was in error mode. Reran the database update now and everything is fine again.

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.