Another Year In Review from a social site.  This time on Untappd, which I use to keep track of various beers I've tried (so that I can remember whether I liked or didn't like them when I see them in the store).  I don't expect of Untappd usage in 2021 since I've decided to take a break from beer in 2021, but we'll see.  Here's what happened in 2020:

 I usually post these a bit earlier in January, but here is my 2020 Goodreads year in review 🙂. I guess I met my minimum reading for 2020, even in a pandemic lockdown ;-)

It's been a busy month, but things are coming down to "normal" levels of activity.  After the crazy rush to finish my completed dissertation draft during the winter break, get caught up with the day job after the winter break, and get everything prepped for my teaching side-gig this spring, I had some time to update my website (club-admiralty.com).

For the longest period of time, I brought my old Mac Mini (2007) out of storage, plugged it in, and updated my site (that thing still runs MacOS 10.6 I think).  I had RapidWeaver 6 on it, along with all the relevant plug-ins.  It wasn't even the most up-to-date version of RW6 because some plugins were breaking left and right.  Since I didn't have time to really troubleshoot I just left it as is.  Most website updates were minor anyway.

Fast forward to more recently.  I got RW8 on sale, so it was a good opportunity to get something that worked on my newer Mac (now I can probably install Linux on that old one), update the website, and try out some new things.  Unfortunately, as technology progresses some things are left behind.  Such is the case with one of my most used plugins: RapidBlog, which takes my blogger content and mirrors it on my domain.  It seems like Loghound hung up his hat and exited the RapidWeaver scene.  The person who maintained the plug-in has not updated it for newer versions of PHP, and with PHP5 being deprecated, RapidBlog has been retired.   Luckily others use Blogger and want to integrate it into RapidWeaver sites, so a Stacks plug-in exists which offers something similar.  What I liked about RapidBlog was that it downloaded an archive of your blog, so there was an offline version of it, and that I could use the iconic theme icons in my blog posts (whereas now I can't). Oh well, site is up and running so that's what matters. On the plus side, it seems like RW development has become very stacks-oriented while I was stuck on RW6, so there is new stuff to explore!

What I've been pondering lately is this: With all the distributed presence that we have on the web these days (facebook, youtube, twitter, etc.), how important is a distinct domain of one's own?  And, how do I go about archiving my stuff from other sites in a way that's not just a portal view from my website?  Something to ponder after I graduate and I can return to this hobby.