18 September 2025
An Apology
Y'all.
I seriously intended to do more updates this year. As in, many more updates. But for reasons that will become slightly clearer, there's been neither the time nor energy for keeping up appearances.
Several of you have dropped me an email or some other form of communication to check in, and I appreciate that from the bottom of my heart.
The News
Since May of 2025, Marcia's been beset by several sequential significant health challenges. If she chooses to do so at some future date, there may be more details here or on her site. While things are stable at this time, I've been keeping up with the job, plus all the chores, plus being Marcia's primary caretaker for those things that need help, as well as helping out in her interactions with the absolutely stellar medical professionals we've been working with up here in the middle of Maine.
To elaborate, we thought that one of the compromises we'd be making when we moved up here from the DC area is that the health care options and availability of specialized care would be much more limited. Turns out that as far as quality of care and the folks we've worked with ... we're beyond thrilled.
So, really, there's not been a bunch of activity not related to the above that I could post about. We did get the boat on the water, and I've been out for a grand total of maybe 8 hours over the summer months, caught a few small fish, and tried to relax while Marcia was at home ... that hasn't worked so good for me. So I haven't done it much.
Some Changes
Since May of 2011, I've been using WordPress (WP) to drive this site. The advantages were significant: compared to the manually written and maintained PHP pages I'd been using (currently available at legacy.orbdesigns.com), WP offered a simple WYSIWYG editing experience, significant ease of use and management of the site, etc.
But in the intervening years, the Internet has continued to be a more hostile environment, especially for self-managed programatically driven CMS sites; Sites that need reasonably constant maintenance for updates of software, plugins, backing services (apache, mysql, PHP) ... the list goes on.
I've been hosting this site and Marcia's two WP sites along with the legacy Orb site and a couple of related static sites on hardware I own, running FreeBSD, sitting in a rack in Maryland. I'm trying to simplify and reduce my dependencies and operating costs (in both time and money).
So what you see here is not in fact a WP site any longer. I exported the WP site to XML using WP native tools, and imported it into Publii (https://getpublii.com/). Publii is a local native CMS tool that I can use as a GUI tool to create new posts, pages, etc. The site itself won't change much, but the output of Publii will be HTML, JS, and CSS flat files that vastly increase the security of the site by decreasing the attack surfaces and amount of ongoing maintenance.
Now instead of a PHP/Apache website backed by a database running on a real OS on real Hardware, Orb Designs is a static website being served out of CloudFlare's CDN network.
Let's see how this goes. Wish me luck with this (and all of the above).