Reset

Making my own decisions is kind of a struggle.

If you’re a regular viewer of jiggyflyjoe.com, you may have noticed that it has undergone some major changes this year since I launched it as a blog/email newsletter hybrid on Substack back in February. You see, what Substack is doing is pretty interesting. It has seen a growing number of independent journalists and writers like Aaron Parnas and Under the Desk News set up shop on the platform that could easily be described as a hybrid between traditional blogging, email newsletters, and social media. I’ve stated numerous times, however, that it was brought to my attention pretty early on that Substack also willingly platforms white supremacists. So I packed up shop and swiftly moved over to Ghost instead.

Ghost was surprisingly refreshing. That’s why Jiggy’s Journal thrived over there for so long. Ghost is also a hybrid platform that mashes up blogging and email. They’re also in the early stages of adopting the open web to add that crucial “social media” element to it. Ghost also has one of the slickest and most enjoyable editor, which allows you to utilize Rich Text and/or Markdown simultaneously. I had (and, honestly, still have) high hopes for Ghost. I’m still rooting for them. But ultimately, the platform was difficult for me to maintain as a self-hosted app on my own server, and paying for their Ghost(Pro) service felt like too much for a personal website like this one. Especially since I would have had to fork over even more cash for the full ability to customize the website’s look, layout, and other critical settings for me.

So ultimately, I wound up back on the old standard WordPress. And look, I thought I would be able to self-host WordPress on my own server because installing it and getting it running was surprisingly quick and easy. But since I’m still extremely new to the whole “self-hosting” thing, I kept running into catastrophic system failure after catastrophic system failure, and in my mind, jiggyflyjoe.com needs to be up and running 24/7. It’s the one link that I provide everywhere on the web. In my social media bios, on other website forums, and even on-screen during my Twitch streams. That said, when the link that I have posted all over the internet doesn’t work, it’s like OCD takes over, and I start to get itchy. What I wound up doing instead is scrapping the entire self-host server build, and I moved this site over to a proper hosting service. Because even while I continue to tinker and experiment with my own home lab and try to understand the concept of Docker, this here website needs stability that only the professionals can provide right now.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken steps to rebuild this site from scratch, and per usual, there were a few casualties. The mailing list was an important one, but I was thankfully able to log back into an old database on the server and manually extract it before fully wiping it, so you should all still receive these posts in your inbox. If not, there are plenty of spaces around jiggyflyjoe.com where you can still subscribe (or re-subscribe if I somehow missed you). One of those places is right below this paragraph! Most of the text from all my old posts is still available, too, but they may have some broken links and missing images, comments, and other elements. I’m going to try and restore the important stuff here and there as I’m able. Those old posts can now be found in The Ghost Archives, because it just sounds cool and spooky, but also because a majority of those posts were written on Ghost.

Essentially, I’m just trying to say: Please don’t mind the mess!

More cool things are coming to the website, as well. WordPress itself is kind of a fun place to experiment because there are so many compatible plugins and services for it. And unlike the platforms in my past, I have full control over this digital space, and we can turn it into whatever we want it to be.

Stay tuned! 😉