Hosting Troubles, Second Guesses, and General Busyness

For the few readers out there who may be wondering why nothing on my site has changed for a month or two, I wanted to drop you a line and let you know I’m not dead. Several things have kept me from my young blog over the past weeks, but I’ve become very anxious to get back to whatever it is I do here on Tilted Symmetry.

Lately I’ve become increasingly dissatisfied with my host, Dreamhost. On top of the many misfortunes that they seemed to have gone through, they have become very slow, even when they’re stable. I persist to have intermittent trouble with my email, and my website has been up and down, and completely crashed 2-3 weeks ago. I’ve been so busy, I didn’t even have time to fix it until this past weekend, leaving me with a dead site for almost two weeks. In spite of the fact that I prepaid for another year only a few short months ago, I’ll be finding a new server to place my sites on very soon.

The next blog-stopper has been some second thoughts I’ve been having about the system that I’ve built my site on, MODx. This has been my favorite CMS of all time, ever, and it continues to hold that title without the slightest hint of a worthy challenger. However, that’s content management. My site is primarily a blog, and for blogging, WordPress is a major contender, with numerous features that make blogging easy, and keep the whole content management thing in the background, letting you write and not concern yourself with managing. With MODx, the more posts I create, the more intimidating my long list of content gets. Additionally, hosting comments on your site with WordPress is a built-in breeze. With MODx, comments have to be installed and configured, and it’s been a real bummer so far. With WordPress, the system is built for one thing, blogging, and it’s built very well and very simply for that single purpose. With MODx, the options are so infinite that simply making up my mind is a headache.

After all is said and done, however, I’ve decided that MODx is still the right solution for my site. Besides the fact that I’ve already invested countless hours building my site on this system, I’m bound to continue to want to change, shift, and morph my site into whatever suits my fancy at the moment, and only MODx is going to make that easy. WordPress can be hacked, but it’s not made for that.

Next up is my day-job, at Darling Creative Group, where I serve as the Multimedia Director, primarily building websites and developing complicated online applications for our clients. We are so busy right now that I barely have a spare moment. I love my job, but sometimes my assembly line is so long that I have to stay up working at night and skip lunch just to feel like things are moving forward. This is no good for both my long- and short-term goals, which involve only working from 8-5, and spending a lot of time with my family, including my firstborn son who is due January of next year. This has also, obviously, left me without any time to write to you. I’m just hoping things will calm down a bit soon.

So I’ve found a brief pocket of time here, long enough to drop in and let you know what’s been going on. I plan on doing some degree of writing, more often than I have been in the past months. It may not be anything too terribly deep, but I’ll at least let you know what’s been happening lately, and maybe drop in a line of code or two, or recommend an application.

I hope all is well with everyone out there. Don’t forget to have lots of fun, and stop to take a deep breath every now and then, and maybe have your favorite delectable beverage.