Under
Refactoring
So yeah…, I have neglected my website for way too long, because of a lack of time, sure, but mostly because of the absence of a friendly deployment workflow. Last week, I decided it was high time to fix this once and for all! I'll write a bit more about this later in my DevLog. But for now this TL;DR summary will do.
The good news is that I now have an almost fully automated workflow from Ddev to GitLab to cPanel. This was somewhat challenging for 2 reasons: first of all, I was still running Drupal 8.9.20 along with 20 modules that needed to be updated; second of all I had no experience deploying from GitLab to a cPanel. Starting in the dark always requires more energy. And sustaining this process without knowing how long it will take has a compounding effect. Anyway, it took me 4 days to get through the 139 releases of Drupal 9, the 84 releases of Drupal 10 and the 29 releases of Drupal 11! And, yes, I went through Composer dependency hell a few times.
I'm happy to report (as Steve use to say) that the old site is now running on Drupal 11.1.6.
The bad news hit me a few hours later: the content was essentially obsolete. For a brief moment I felt dizzy and wondered if all this work was not a waste of time. I decided to give myself a few hours to ponder and sleep on it.
In the end, I realized with unexpected joy that, hey! it was easy to remediate to all this obsolete content now that I had an easy deployment workflow in place; I just needed to sit down and start writing.
That said, I'm not sure that writing good old articles works for me anymore. Let's face it, it can easily take one or two days to write a solid article, perhaps more. That's a big chunk of time and weekends aren't made for that (bee there, done that!). I also feel that, as a writing form, the article may be somewhat passé; looks like I also need to upgrade the process of documenting/sharing knowledge. So I have been spending time thinking about other writing forms. More on this later.
Also, for obscure historical reasons, the content was strictly limited to my work. It's time to tear down these walls, time to consider more than just Drupal, time to have some fun!
OK, so what's the plan? Where's the joy?
Progressive
Makeover
Well, in the next few months the plan is to progressively transition from the present moribund state to something that I hope will be more dynamic, satisfying, spirited and upbeat. If I can achieve the proverbial «works for me!» then chances are it will also be much more interesting for visitors like you ? There are still visitors like you, right ? Or is it all bots now…?
Updates
- April 15, 2025, Post Mortem - Upgrading from Drupal 8.9.20 to 11.1.6.
- Jan 26 2021, a few more Projects (2020) and a revamped Contact form.
- Jan 15 2021, deployment of a beta version of DevLog.
- Jan 03 2021, deployment of this Under Construction page.