Shutting off the server (and part of me)

Back in September of last year I wrote about the dance I went through to migrate this blog to Drupal 10, on a shiny new web server. 

I then followed up, in November, with a rundown of my side projects, still hosted on an expensive legacy server.

I’m happy — relieved — to have completed the last of the items under the “In Progress” heading on that “side projects” post, and with that, to have terminated the server (did I mention it was expensive) that was hosting them.

Beyond the technical ins and outs, this is a tale of procrastination, grief, overwhelm, and retirement: it took me 5 years to do what amounted, in absolute hours, a work week’s worth of shutdown work. 

That work required focus, and the ability to hold a lot of things in my head at the same time, and both of those things were in very short supply until recently.

I realize, in retrospect, that this Large Hairy Task had served a purpose as a last foot in the door of a digital life that I’d lived, intensely, for more than 3 decades. As long as it was hanging out there, not completed, I was still “needed” by the digital world. So I had to get over that to get to the finish line, and to be able to pull the big switch fully into the OFF position.

I still have a digital garden to maintain, but it’s a much less complex garden, and I’m no longer in the practice of making it more complex. I get my kicks from analog more than digital these days, and that makes me happy.