Since the dawn of internet time I’ve been a frequent user of MySpace, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, Medium, TinyLetter, Instagram, and now Substack. The only remaining accounts I have are Instagram (used sparingly), and Substack.

As I migrate from platform to platform over the years, having a single home which I control (codexgalactic.com; self hosted) seems all the more important (see some previous post about how I’ve resurrected a defunct TinyLetter by crossposting to my self-hosted wordpress, ensured my substack posts are backedup on my self-hosted wordpress, and exported my medium content to my self-hosted wordpress).

Right now I also have a project to migrate my Twitter archive going. I’m excited to bring some content and blog posts from my 27,395 tweets (2010-2022), 20,730 original (not retweets) (!!!!)

With changing trends, making sure I have a single home vs. having my content live on a provider whose whims and community fashion maintains, will be a commitment of mine going forward, particularly now that vibecoding makes migration trivial.

That being said I needed to upgrade my WordPress to reflect it’s new importance as the central source of truth on my internet presence.

Doing some housecleaning on my WordPress install to support its new canonical source role

• SSL Manager Namecheap pluging to automatically handle SSL Activation, installation and removal
• Updraft Plus to do weekly backups to Dropbox, as well as an initial manual backup
• Really Simple Security for security scan

Dealing with the comment spam problem by disabling comments

• Disabled comments on new posts (Settings->Discussion, uncheck “Allow people to submit comments”, uncheck “Allow link notifications”)
• Disabled comments on historical posts (Posts->All Posts->Select all->Edit->Apply->Comments “Do not allow” in batches)
• Deleted comments in review (this was more surgery – I went into phpMyAdmin from my CPanel and ran some dangerous looking SQL queries after a dry run – it worked!)
• I hope folks still feel empowered to Get in touch but having a backlog of 161k+ spam comments (even with a spam plugin installed) was not the way.

Proactively mirroring content going forward

Going forward I’m going to try to proactively mirror content here if I create it elsewhere, or even better create here and then mirror elsewhere. If there’s on thing that’s certain it’s that my platform of choice will change, and that I’ll want to continue to create content and have my content accessible. Grateful to have been able to preserve what I’ve created so far, and I’m also excited to mine some of the historical content I’ve created to present in new forms for discussion.

Why do I create or write? Well I can’t help it, and I enjoy meeting others who have that urge as well. There’s no better way than putting out there what you are making to the world for discussion. Get in touch (just not via the comments)