Tornadoofchaos.uk

For the last week I’ve been slowly migrating my blog from wordpress.com to a self-hosted server, using my web development skills learned in another life. Whenever I get to use things I learned in previous lives it’s always a nice feeling. Nostalgic in a positive way, without wanting to return to those ‘lives’. There is a firm line underneath.

Again this is an example of something which belies my absolute level of functionality at the moment, given that so much previous experience went into it that many aspects were effortless. But also I am at great risk of self-destructive obsessiveness with tasks like this currently, with the background level of OCD-related stress/anxiety/dissociation making me really susceptible to periods of frustration-induced hyperfocus and not thinking clearly, especially with the tasks that were more complex or required a lot of trial-and-error.

And then, because of that, I am not getting around to other things I want and need to do, not least writing and engaging with people on here. I am just operating at a minimum level with that. But the positive thing was that halfway through the website stuff I did make progress on correcting those traumatising, dissociative hyperfocus situations. I have trauma from the experience of reaching the ends of tasks with no feeling of satisfaction due to being drained from the OCD and dissociation. Not least from when this impacted me whilst actually working in web development…even self-employed, and that is not a good situation! Lol. No, I am happy to keep it as a hobby and as a useful skill.

But this time I did manage to take steps back and tackle my website todo list in a measured way, bit by bit. It’s also not helped by my impatience to get stuff done! The worst part for me is having to wait for something to ‘propagage’ through a system I am not in control of. Having to wait 24 hours just to see if my posts start displaying in the WordPress Reader feed correctly…ouch.

Anyway, I’m relieved to feel able to post again and I now have more control of my website, which comes with pros and cons.

Changes

• All followers & email subscribers are now migrated to my new site tornadoofchaos.uk.
• My posts won’t appear in Reader search or ‘tag search’, only in site search. (This is a feature which comes for free with wordpress.com but that you need to pay for when running a self-hosted wordpress site. On the face of it this seems needlessly capitalistically cruel, but it does make sense since one feature is more passive than the other in terms of their compute resources it requires to implement…but it can be seriously confusing when you try to manually search for someone’s posts after accidentally unfollowing them, and feel like you’re going crazy).
• All my previous likes are gone 😭😭. It’s always been encouraging watching the totals add up on older posts. But it’s always ok to start again.
• No ads when viewing my blog in a browser without an ad-blocker!

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