First post

Creating my new net home

Start Stream of conciousness - I’m not going to slow down here, just go:

I’ve recently been swimming in a sea of distraction, borderline depression, and I’ve got a spark to start fresh. I am fired up and want to engage with the world around me a little bit more. Doing so on the internet is not a solution, but I think this is more of an attempt to stop blocking myself from engagement, and start a channel of some sort.

Typically - my workflow looks like this:

  • Get inspired and super excited about an idea
  • Do some prototyping or start writing code, and then realize I jumped the ship. The idea is not good, or maybe I need to design it first.
  • Go start designing, creating a backlog, or making design concepts.
  • Lose steam, stop working on it.

So, instead I want to start small. I want to get my blog running first, as a place to hold this journey. So its 8:47 AM on a Monday now, and I have some time to kill before my next meeting. How long will it actually take to get this published to the web? Let’s see…

Things to do

  • Get Astro setup locally w/ a template
  • Make only critical modifications to make “work” for me.
  • Add this post as first post.
  • Get hosted on existing DigitalOcean server on root domain.
  • Put existing content at old.mikescottbowen.com or something similar.

From there I can tweak, enhance, and start my journey.

Future Things to do

  • Talk about xbiking and building my commuter bike
  • Talk about Longmont
  • Talk about Salesforce Architecture and Development
  • Talk about side projects

Large Goals

  • Engage with my community more
  • Read more books
  • Write and express more (and actually complete small things)

Ahh, what a nice post, sort of a brain dump to kick this off. Happy 2024!

Mike

Appendix / Progress Update

Update 9:09 AM

  • Ok, I’ve got Astro installed, stripped minimal boilerplate, and now its got my first blog post in it.
  • Let’s get logged into (and dust off) my webserver.

Update 9:58 AM - We’re Live!

  • Succesfully logged into my VM on digital ocean
  • Pushed everything to git
  • Pulled the repo to my local webserver
  • Did some googling to remember where my Apache2 configurations are stored, and modified the virtual host config
  • Restarted Apache
  • Now we’re live!

So lets go onward to better things.

  • Get SSH enabled so it doesn’t say “not secure” on this website that I last used in 2014!!
  • Update server to not be on Ubuntu 12.04. This will involve re-deploying mikescottbowen.com and plainfieldsignsinc.com (my parents business website)
  • Make sure we have a CI pipeline that is easy to use, ideally pushing to git will just auto pull changes and run builds on the server
  • Update the blog to look more “me”
  • Keep writing content!