blog posts

I was using Jetpack’s sitemap plugin and even submitted it to Google until I noticed that it had the wrong protocol for all of the post URL’s. Now Google has a bunch of ‘http’ URL’s for my posts in its listings, even though they are available over ‘https’. I couldn’t figure out how to change the protocol (there is no config or documentation about where that is coming from) so I just disabled the sitemap for now.


Just one day after writing that I would try to post once a day, I missed posting. Certainly contributing to my difficulties in posting is the amount of time I spend thinking about and composing posts. Sometimes when I have a topic that I could easily write a short post about, I have a desire to hold off until I can write a more in-depth version. But really, I’d prefer to write more and get my ideas and experiences out sooner, even if the results are imperfect and more open to criticism. I can always revisit later. If I don’t write when it’s on my mind, there’s a chance it just will never get written. I have tons of blog post ideas or partial drafts written down that are old enough now that I don’t remember enough about them anymore to easily write about them.

Also contributing to my difficulties is the never-ending stream of new blog posts and other information other people are creating for me to read. I tend to get sucked into reading them, ignoring getting my own things done. A while back, I wrote on my whiteboard “Less reading, more writing”. I haven’t been following that advice, but that’s part of my goal with this post-per-day idea. We’ll see how I do.


I am going to try to post something once a day for a while, either on this blog or my personal blog, even if it is just a short, tweet-sized post. I think posting helps me document what I’m working on, techniques, things I find, etc. for my future self to more easily find. It’s surprisingly easy to forget things when I figure them out for one project, then don’t use that same thing again for a little while. My site will eventually have something more advanced for these purposes, but for now simple blog postings will work.

Also, I’ve noticed a strange SEO / traffic benefit to my site wherein my traffic is much more likely to be on the higher side on the day or day after I post, even though those posts are almost never the ones being visited. Perhaps the search-engine algorithms see the site as more “fresh”, even though the articles that get the bump aren’t fresh at all.

The biggest problem with this is that even a post I intend to be quick often takes an inordinately long time as I look up things and add more to it. Like this post. We’ll see how well I do with my goal.


And we’re back

I haven’t posted anything on this site since 2011. My “professional” site and related blog took my attention as I focused on my career. In 2011, this site was hosted from my home on an iBook. That server probably was taken down within a couple years of that post when I moved and didn’t bother trying to get it back up and running. By that point, I had my “professional” site on a shared host (Dreamhost) and liked what it had to offer. I no longer had to worry about keeping my IP updated with DynDNS or the downtime from internet outages (common with my Windstream DSL), server problems, router problems, etc.

This site was down for a period, but at some point I migrated it over to my Dreamhost server. I started it at personal.tobymackenzie.com. After a while, I decided it needed its own domain and would be a good candidate for a .name domain, so I bought tobymackenzie.name. The site was still not fully functional though. Some pages and sections were completely broken, and for a while I couldn’t log into the WordPress install this blog is run with.

Recently, I went through and got most things working and threw a more recent, responsive theme (Twenty Fifteen) onto the blog. A few sections still don’t work. I may have lost the data for the almost never used forums. The gallery is run by software that shared photos from my iPhoto library, no longer possible on shared hosting. I may replace these at some point, though I would probably only put the forum back in a read-only mode for posterity.

Anyway, this site is old and outdated. Some of the information is inaccurate. At some point soon, I intend to replace it with something new, probably something built on Symfony. I hope to merge the code-base and some of the content of my “professional” and personal sites, though in appearance and most content they will remain separate to serve their own purposes most effectively. I will leave this site as is on a sub-domain for posterity. As with most of my personal projects, who knows when I will actually get to it, but I have been itching to play with some things that I don’t get to at work.

As to this blog, I hope to get back into the habit of writing for it. I’ve put a lot of focus on my career lately, but miss thinking and writing about some of my other interests. It can be somewhat therapeutic to write down my ideas or about things happening in my life. Lately, my interest in homes and architecture has been coming back. Hopefully, this blog will be seeing me as regularly as it once did and my thoughts will be archived for my future self and others.