I like to write. I have fun writing, sometimes. Other times it’s a slog. Just like anything creative, I suppose.

From a random writing prompt I found which challenged me to describe how an everyday article would be perceived by an alien: I want to do more writing and thought it would be fun to do some writing prompts while on vacation. This was composed on my mobile, which went better than I could have expected. It is like a beach from home. The shore is a different substance and the water isn’t the same sort of water either.

Today I roll out the new commenting system for Drezn: Commentry. For a long while I wasn’t sure of how best to get feedback, if any, or if it was important given the practical realities. But in the end, were there an audience, and should those souls wish to express any response, it would be a shame if there were no method available, and that has been the case until now.

I write a fair amount of documentation for systems administration and other tech stuff and have for years now—I suppose my entire professional life (go me!). I’m very interested in tools that don’t get in my way when I’ve got a flow going, and I find a text editor with basic markup or formatting codes is the way to go. In the last semi-long while—probably five years?—I’ve pretty much settled on Markdown or whatever variants the tool I’m using implements.

I don’t know how I’m going to come up with new blog titles about the same thing. I’m calling this “day 11” of a “lockdown” although it’s not a lockdown here, yet—it’s socially distancing, staying home except for essentials and semi-essentials (we’re planning to pick up pizza tonight). It’s day 11 because it’s the 11th day of us not allowing our kids to see friends up close, though it’s only been four or five days since the BC government has discouraged meeting up with anybody outside your immediate family, at any distance, at all.

I didn’t do much more work on pulling content out of the archived, two-decade old files than I did the other night or when I wrote the article yesterday. By the time I wrote about it I’d exhausted pretty much everything I could think of that was reasonable to try. Before completely giving up and manually picking apart the files using strings (a Unix tool that streams through a file and prints out any text it finds amongst the binary gibberish) or a hex editor I decided to post a question about it on Server Fault, a site for systems administrators to help eachother figure out tough problems.

The original Drezn used a custom Berkeley DB/GnuDB backend which is described as much as it needs to be in the About text. Out of historical interest, or something, I’ve spent some trying to extract that content and convert it so it can be republished. So this is about how that’s been going. As can be inferred from that introduction, this is at best going to be a multipart article on how I did that.

Well, here we are. We’re in voluntary lockdown. Sort of. A good time as any to come back to this blog. I should stop giving a crap about leaving it and coming back, because then I inevitably write a painfully self-aware paragraph about how I’m coming back to the blog. I know I’m not the only one—I suspect something like ten percent of the content on public blogging sites will be like that.

Resurrecting my blog (yeah, haven’t gotten super far with that so far, have I) is about a couple of different things. Part of it as described in the neo-seminal entry is to ditch Facebook. In fact, the thing that probably occurred to me first was that I needed a place to post a manifesto on why I was quitting Facebook. This is my manifesto for quitting Facebook. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

Quite some time ago I had a personal website I set up for a blog and random thoughts. I wrote it with PHP using the only database I had available at the time for no extra cost from my hosting service. I can’t remember what the hosting service was, but I recall it cost $40/month and if I didn’t want to spend the extra $10 or whatever every month for database service I had to use Berkeley DB.