In the same way that you wonder what the hell you did with your time before you got married and had kids, the rise of the machines has put into history yet another before and after. Previous before-afters include the telephone, television, rail travel, air travel, vaccines, Elvis, and Nixon.
With the rise of the digital life you can now spend your free time:
- downloading to/from, synching, updating, and otherwise endlessly fiddling with your favorite music playback device
- downloading to/from, reviewing, synching, tagging, and otherwise endlessly fiddling with your digital camera and images
- downloading to/from, synching, deleting or adding items, and otherwise endlessly fiddling with your tablet
- downloading to/from, synching, updating, or otherwise endlessly fiddling with your mobile/digital/cell phone and perhaps your Lt. Uhuru style talk/hear dongle
- Reading anything and everything out there on the www, getting into an endless back in forth in the comments section of an Amazon review or a Salon article, liking, tweeting, ooopping, acking, barfing, gagging
For the do it yourself web writers and web site owners there’s an additional infinity of ‘stuff’ depending on your pain threshold and how much digital diy you like: WordPress (or similar), hosting platforms, plugins, virtual servers, Amazon cloud and cdn, server memory allocation, htaccess settings, secure hosting, php settings, certificates, python versions, shopping carts, and other technological gobbeldygook. Most recently I’ve been busy reviewing server log files to figure when one of my sites got hacked and who did it (who being an IP address, and not much more).
The hacking was more an annoyance than any sort of vandalism: a hacker dumped about a thousand .html files in an obscure directory on one of my sites. The purpose was to create traffic, or seo backlinks, to another site to rise that sites’s rankings in Google search. Since then I’ve spent over a month tearing down most of my web sites, rebuilding them from scratch, and isolating them all so if one is broken into the others are still safe, and various other security and web site hardening techniques. While the technology is interesting, there are other things I’d rather be doing, and no one is paying me to do this.
To simplify things I decided to retire the Marseille Travel Journal site. The name of the site, something I probably should have put more thought into, was already outdated since we had left Marseille over a year ago. But over and above the name the actual maintenance of another web site was and is too time consuming. Almost all of the writings and images from the Marseille Travel Journal site have been moved to this site, and most of the clean up should be done.