My professional change served as a catalyst for some personal change. Nothing drastic, just messing with this site a little.
New Look!
I have been sitting on the Twenty Twenty-One theme for a few years now. When it comes to themes, I just want something that looks nice and is low maintenance, and it served its purpose well. I skipped Twenty Twenty-Two because, well, I did not really want to dig into changing it to my personal preference.
The latest built-in theme, Twenty Twenty-Three, is nice and clean, and pretty close to what I was using in Twenty Twenty-One. I went ahead and activated that one, and chose the darker style to match my soul…. I am kidding. I appreciate a good dark theme, so you know my site will reflect that.
New Plugins!
From time to time, I will make sure that my plug-ins are updated and that the WordPress Site Health page does not have any unexpected warnings. This time around, I noticed that I had no caching detected.
But, wait…. I have Redis Object Cache installed and running. And, literally, as soon as I read that plugin name, I realized that “object cache” is not the same as “browser cache.” So I started looking for a browser cache plugin.
I landed on WP-Optimize from UpdraftPlus. The free version is sufficient for what I need, and the setup was very easy. I got the plugin installed, and just before I ran the optimization, I noticed the warning to backup the DB using UpdraftPlus. And that’s when I realized, my backup process was, well, non-existent.
In the past, I have used the All-in-One WP Migration plugin to backup/restore. However, the free version is limited to a size that I have long surpassed, and there is no way that I saw to automate backups. Additionally, the “backups” are stored in the same storage location, so unless I manually grabbed them, they did not go offsite.
UpdraftPlus provides scheduled backups as well as the ability to push those backups to external storage. Including, as luck would have it, an S3 bucket. So I was able to configure UpdraftPlus to push backups to a new bucket in my MinIO instance, which means I know have daily backups of this site…. It only took 2 years.
With UpdraftPlus and WP-Optimize installed, I dropped the All-in-One WP Migration plugin.
New Content?
Nope…. Not yet, anyway. Over the past year, I have really tried to post every four days. While I do not always hit that, having deadlines pushed me to post more often than I have in the past. While I don’t have the capacity to increase the number of posts, I am targeting to add some variety to my posts. I have been leaning heavily towards technical posts, but there’s a lot of non-technical topics on which I can wax poetic… Or, more like, do a brain dump on…
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