When I started this blog I used Wordpress. Wordpress is web-based content management system that uses PHP and one of MySQL or MariaDB to store the post data. I used Wordpress for years moving between a few different hosts finally settling on Linode.

Wordpress is a great product and has a healthy, vibrant user community. There are thousands of plugins and themes. There's phone apps for making blog posts on-the-go. However, being a dynamic web tool it is vulnerable to security issues. It is a constant game of whack-a-mole keeping things updated. Plugins add new bugs, and sometimes plugins are written with purposeful backdoors.

Over three years ago I decided to move away from Wordpress to something non-dynamic. Something with fewer vulnerabilities. I initially tried Hugo and found a tool that exports posts from Wordpress to Hugo. However, I found I didn't really like Hugo, and I just kinda... didn't do anything about it for a long time. Years a long time.

A few weeks ago I decided to revisit things. I found Pelican, a Python-based static website builder. It is very similar to Hugo in form and function, but being written in Python it jibes with my knowledge and skills much better than Hugo. Posts and pages are written in reStructuredText or Markdown, or even HTML. I use Markdown and HTML in a few cases. Each document has fields of metadata that Pelican parses to build out a full static website. There are a number of themes and I'm presently using the bootcamp2 theme. Pelican also has dozens of plugins that add plenty of capabilities but zero vulnerabilities.

It took a few weeks to slowly fix up all the posts that previously had been exported from Wordpress into Hugo-flavored Markdown into something Pelican could read. I uploaded a fair number of videos to YouTube, and had to adjust various other media here and there.

At the same time I'm moving my website to a new Linode server. This new server will not run any PHP or other dynamic web content which should keep things much simpler.

I'm going to try to post here more often and more consistently. Let's see if I succeed!

An M. Ruggles original.

Here are some kid arts! First, we have some art from kid #2, and lower down in a separate is art from kid #1. Don't get too scared when #1's animals open their mouths!

Vote early! Vote often!

As I have since 2007, I am scorekeeping a Tour de France fantasy team pool. Please click here to see how poorly my "Team Florky" is doing as the tour progresses.

A panorama of our local sledding hill at Tantra Park, Boulder

From this morning. No audio but it's in 4K!

Above is a collection of worn-out cycling shorts and jerseys that I am going to get rid of. All the shorts are worn out and uncomfortable. The jerseys have holes or are being held together with safety pins. Basically, I don't see myself wearing any of this ever again.

Judging by how long since I last purged my old cycling clothes, I will do this all over again in about 9 years.

A few days ago Bitbucket announced that they were ending support for Mercurial and will only support Git starting in about a year. I am a happy Mercurial user. It was the first DVCS system I learned, and have had no reason to switch away from it. Git is more popular than Mercurial, yes, but with useful plugins like hg-git, I never need to use Git even when I am working on a Git repository. Ultimately, the difference between Git and Mercurial is kind of like the difference between Windows and Mac (in that order). One is more popular than the other, but when it comes down to featureset and capabilities, it's very close. Like Windows vs. Mac, the main difference is the experience of using them, and I feel Mercurial is the clear winner.

I only use Bitbucket for their Mercurial support, so I decided to waste no time and abandon them entirely and immediately. In their place I am self-hosting an install of the community (open source) edition of Rhodecode. There are a couple of my repositories publicly viewable here. So far it seems like it has more than enough features to replace Bitbucket.

Update: As of this writing, I turned my self-hosted code server off because I'm lazy.

I feel I should point out that this serves as a reminder to me (and to you, dear reader) that cloud services cannot be relied upon. Companies, even if you are paying them, can stop serving you. This is at least the second time I have had to replace a cloud service with a self-hosted solution. A few years ago I replaced Google Reader with tt-rss. Like I wrote previously, because my new Mercurial hosting service is self-hosted, no one will be taking it away from me. And that is good.

Finally, I don't know why anyone would choose Bitbucket now to host their code repositories. Without Mercurial, all it has it Git, and Github (which has obviously been Git-only from the start) has already won:

Github

Bitbucket

As I have since 2007, I am scorekeeping a Tour de France fantasy team pool. Please click here to see how poorly my "Team Florky" is doing as the tour progresses.

Modern Cars are Boring.

All taken at the Forney Transportation Museum in Denver.

This spring we scattered a couple bags of wildflowers all over a part of our yard we knew we couldn't/weren't going to actively garden this year. In previous years, that part of our yard has been mostly weeds and some native grasses. We think that it looks better covered in wildflowers, and so do our local pollinators.

A view out our front window, today.

Earlier this year I bought a 2018 Santa Cruz Tallboy C. This is my first full squish mountain bike, and it is awesome. The thing just floats over rocks and is much more forgiving than my old hard tail. It has 29" wheels, a 12 speed cogset, disc brakes, and a dropper post, all of which make the bike completely different from what I'm used to. Comparing times on Strava, I am faster on descents and any reasonably bumpy sections with this bike, which isn't exactly the point of getting a bike like this, but it is nice. There are trails I had stopped riding with my old hard tail because they were not fun that this bike makes fun. And that's the point.