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Welcome to Wordpress!

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Welcome to Wordpress! This is my first posting on my new system, and it feels good to know that most of the hard part is over. I’ve decided to rename my blog “Flailing Wildly” because I think it fits me pretty well, and it sounds better than “Skyzyx.com”. I’m also wanting to move to something more professional sounding that covers any domain name I may want to have, so “Skyzyx.com” is now officially “Skyzyx Technologies”.

For those who don’t know, I started working on my website’s redesign about a year and a half ago. After several months of development, my hard drive fried, and I lost nearly everything. This was rather discouraging, and as such I didn’t get around to beginning development fresh until April-ish of this year. I got Wordpress installed (I love the 5 minute install), exported the then-current entries, and imported everything into Wordpress… no problems.

A huge part of this redesign is an overhaul of the information architecture. This site has grown far beyond what I had initially anticipated, and I was still using 2 year old IA. So, I began organizing my categories as much as possible, and placing posts in multiple categories, where appropriate. About 2 months ago, I started getting 500 errors in Movable Type. This had less to do with Movable Type, and more to do with a bug in the latest release of CPanel, which is what my other webhost uses (for now… I’m switching hosts for .com this month). Anyways, I couldn’t login anymore, which meant that I couldn’t export my posts from Movable Type anymore.

So last night I had an epiphany. Log onto my .com server, backup my Movable Type database, install Movable Type on my .net server, import the database backup, and use the MT interface to do a formal export, which I then imported back into Wordpress. The whole thing took about 15 minutes to accomplish, after spending the last two months frustrated over the whole thing.

Anyways, I’m moving Skyzyx.com to the same host that I have Skyzyx.net at: Dreamhost. Dreamhost is freakin’ awesome, and that’s all I have to say about that. Anyways, all of the content that is currently at Skyzyx.com will still exist once my dual-site strategy goes live. Skyzyx.com will be the home of all things professional: my resume, projects like SimplePie and Tarzan that could almost be considered “Products”, and things like Web Building Resources and such. Things that are a little more static, and don’t need to be updated as often. Skyzyx.net will be more personal and experimental in nature. This is where my weblog will live, along with experimental software, CVS repositories, etc. This is the plan today, anyways. Or I might simply have any address at Skyzyx.com redirect to the same files Skyzyx.net, or vice versa.

Anyways, I’m back. I was never dead, I was just trying to balance fixing my website, caring for my new son, and figuring out how to develop JSTL-based, Ajax-enabled portlets for Oracle Portal (at work). Things are coming along. Expect lots and lots and lots of changes while I get used to this Wordpress thing, figure out how to build my own design, and generally get this forever-old redesign out and ready to go.

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.