SCS047 Progress

I worked from home today, so I was able to get a few personal things done while working for the office.

I’ve been able to build some vector assets for the project. I bounced a test video off of Carl to make sure he understood a weird asymmetry I found in a log. He gave it his blessing. I’m now in the process of creating a much better high-resolution version of the 3D assets.

I ordered a couple of $5 pizzas from Pizza Hut. I shouldn’t have. Buyer’s remorse. I will do much better tomorrow.

We’re Live!

FireworksThe new site is live! I’ve decided on a WordPress platform moving forward, as I’ve completely burned out on using DotNetNuke. The site is also hosted internally on the Suncoast Studios server farm – no more crappy hosted solutions.

The last couple of items were shored up, including dropping the Google Analytics code into the site, and also setting up and applying a Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate.

What’s this site doing back online? Didn’t Chewbode abandon it? Yes. And no. I recently realized that I tried too hard to make the site flexible in the past. That hurt the creativity. Bouncing around from platform to platform, using hosted services that lost my data – it was a nightmare.

For some time now I’ve known that there were fragments of old blog posts scattered throughout the file server and in archives online. I really just wanted to get everything in one place. And, now that the Suncoast Studios infrastructure has been built out, there’s a great platform here to drive projects. The first stop on that journey: this site.

So, I saw that if I kept it simple and invested a little time, I could bring everything back together under one roof. That’s why I went with WordPress.

What’s the future of this site? What’s next? Well, for now, I’m just going to post blog entries as often as possible. While I was importing all of the old entries, I read most of them, and realized that the blogging used to inspire me to be creative and productive. I’ve lacked this for some time now. Hopefully I’ll get that back, and then some.

Imports Complete

Offline Archive 2 and all of the readable entries from Archive.org have been imported. Some things to note:

  • The old versions of the Museum and photo galleries won’t be rebuilt.
  • Google Analytics is currently not installed but needs to be.

Since April 23, 2016, I’ve been building this site on a development platform on my internal server. After Google Analytics is properly set up, I’ll roll out WordPress to the production site and secure it with an SSL certificate.

Offline Archive 1 Imported

Offline Archive 1: I had an old file on the file server with posts from Apr 2004 through Dec 2005, and from Oct 2010 through Jan 2011. All of these have no been imported into this site. Some pictures are missing, and I’ve done a little bit of cleanup on some typos and formatting.

Offline Archive 2: I have another offline archive file that looks to be from Apr 2011 through Mar 2012 that I’m going to be importing now.

Lastly, I’ve seen that there’s a bunch of blog entries that are available on Archive.org from a previous incarnation of this site. These entries span from Dec 2005 through Nov 2008. That’ll be the final archive I import (hopefully today).

Backlog

Yesterday, Cari and I spent some time running some errands and doing some chores in the early part of the day. Around 2:30pm, we went over to the TGI Friday’s for lunch. The rest of the day, we drove north through East Lake, then Trinity, across to Odessa, and down the Veteran’s to back home. Along the way we stopped at a Lowe’s and saw some great things for the house. We ended the trip by grabbing some Cold Stone ice cream.

Today, I’m going through a bunch of old, archived chewbode.com blog posts and am spending the effort to import them into this site – the entries from April 2004 onward.

A New Era

SunriseYesterday I received an email that all of the paperwork for the new house is finally complete. The process started in earnest on January 28, but it took some time to jump through all of the hoops. I have a meeting coming up soon where I’ll sit with construction team and go over the timeline. The expected completion date is early August. We’re pretty excited.

Even though it’s only been three months since I first started the process going, I’ve been planning out a new studio infrastructure for about a year. I’ve racked all of the equipment, ordered new network switches, and have been building a new server environment. Part of this has been virtualizing and normalizing all of the computers, which has been a challenge. The last piece of that will be completed this coming week, when I receive a new 5TB hard drive for one of the hypervisors. Once it’s installed, I’ll move the file server to it and be done building servers.

There are currently two projects I’m spinning up now: doing some design and animation side-work for Carl, and creating some landing pages on the internal webserver for all sites for all of the domains I own. The latter task is a two-phase project. Phase one will be all about building the sites in the server, dropping CMS systems in place, and getting the sites, most of which have been offline for years, at least responding again. Phase two involves building out internal “dev” versions of the sites, testing them, then rolling them out to the internet-facing production webserver. So, over the next several months, sites should be coming back online.

Well, it’s time to run some errands. I’ll post soon.