Welcome Back to Creative Crossfitting

Saturday morning contemplations on the possibilities of the day have me thinking of which way I’d like to jump…it’s a glorious spring day, and I’ve got a veggie patch to plant out, a garage to play in, a handful of software projects to code up or geek on, and a run to fit in at some point. But it’s the writing which seems to be calling to me most loudly this morning. Or, more specifically, the governance and organisation of my writing.

A handful of years back, I posted my original “Creative Crossfitting” blog as a place to hold my various musings. Scattered words on running, aircraft, business, music, code…it was a short lived experiment in failed time management, to be honest. A smattering of self-indulgent drivel with way too many ellipses… (see what I did there? Disgusting)

So let’s do it again. Let’s get things organised. Dig the old domain name out. Spend a bit of time looking for template which doesn’t offend. Get my image editing software back out for basic cropping. And dust off the keyboard (ASCII, not clavier).

That’s my goal for the day.

Done. Stated. So what happens next?

The website – well, that’s easy. I learned WordPress long ago and accept it for its foibles. Easy to use, easy to keep up to date, and a ton of non-offensive templates to choose from.

Hosting location…not as easy (and see? Those damned ellipses. They just roll off my fingertips like mordants in a Mozart sonata). Choices:

1. I could self host on Google Cloud, Azure, or AWS. In the past (and there’s a post on this in my archives), I stacked a Kubernetes cluster for one iteration of Creative Crossfitting. Great fun, but was a bit costly for what it was (by memory, I was racking up ~$50 per month in charges for the full stack). I could also use a prebuilt Azure image on super small infrastructure…same end game from a cost point of view.
2. I could self host on my own internal network at home…we’ve got a fixed IP address and I’ve got a few old boxes lying around which would work perfectly fine as a sacrificial lamb for the millions of inbound hits which it’d be subject to. Downside is speed, as we’re still in a fibre to the node section of the world. And I’d have to build a backup strategy, firewall the damn thing, and wade through the conf files of either HTTPD or Nginx. Ugh.
3. Call Karl…my old, trust, Crossfit and martial arts mate, Karl Kaczmarczyk, has designed, implemented, and hosted all of my business material for the last 15 years. Reliable, dependable, already backed up, and just a really nice guy.
4. Use a hosting service – I’d already signed up last year for a hosting service, so it might be in place still.

OK – a bit of work to do there.

DNS…that’s a bit easier. Once the hosting service is up, I’ll need to dig out my GoDaddy records to set the A records up. Test the email to make sure I haven’t broken anything which is already in place. But pretty straight forward.

And apologies – this has gotten a bit tech…I’ll try to pull it back. “Can I have categories for $200 please, Alex?”

Categories! What do I want to write about? This one is far easier.

• Aircraft Building – kinda says exactly what it should be, but it’ll be a catchall for any creative building projects I’ve got going on. The pool. The house. If it has to do with possibly separating my fingers from my hands with power tools, this is where it’ll live.
• Music – while I’m no longer a “professional” gigging musician, I’m still playing. Anything music related will go here.
• Running – I’m a self-reported exercise junky. The long run is my personal favourite, but I’ve just started with The Den (think Crossfit for more august folks).
• Leadership – ooooh….a new category. Any business or leadership related musings will go here.
• Geek – yep. Inevitable. I’m learning every single day. New technologies and ways to expand on old technologies.

Ok – so we know what the buckets are. How about the cadence?

Cadence – the first couple of iterations of Creative Crossfitting showed me that holding myself to a deadline was really amusing to others around me. What was it that Douglas Adams said?

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

I’m kinda like that, but don’t want to be. So, let’s commit to one post per week. That should be simple. And if something doesn’t inspire me during the week, I haven’t been in the moment enough.

How exciting! A Saturday morning, and I’ve got a plan. Now…what to put in the first post?

Addendum, at the end of the day. If you’re reading this, I’ve obviously succeeded in my quest (cue “to dream…the impossible dream….” on Apple music). Ended up going with BlueHost and selecting the barest bone, lowest cost, grungiest solution possible. Meh…what could possibly go wrong.

Thank you so much for reading and please bookmark the page. I’ll be posting on a regular basis.