Bryan Ruby

Yesterday, I wrote in my personal blog that I voluntarily retired from the National Weather Service, departing with full benefits including a pension and my retirement investments. After spending a decade as a meteorologist and more than two decades as their information technology officer, I had done all that I had set out to do in my career as a federal employee. It was simply time for me to move on and accept new challenges.

Last year at this time, we quietly introduced a new website called INFOTECH Pub. It was an effort to see if there was enough interest in a website focused on information technology much in the same way we've seen interest in socPub and CMS Report. Well, the short answer is no.

During the past seven days I've been upgrading our websites from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. There are four of them which includes socPub, CMS Report, INFOTECH Pub, and After Work Pub. While one is never quite done with the work, we're quickly moving from the upgrade back to the maintenance phase of these website. As the dust settles down it will soon be time to start focusing on the content and presence of these websites.

This past month I replaced a line of Hi-Fi speakers I've listened to and enjoyed for the past 20 years with a pair of new floor speakers from Klipsch. It's an acknowledgment that my hearing and tastes have changed and it's time to listen to my music through a new stereo system. This recognition of needing to do things differently has become a common theme for me lately. I'm finding the old ways aren't working and perhaps joy can be found again by doing something new. With this theme on change, instead of blogging only when I'm inspired by great ideas or events, I decided to blog every few days as I take part in the 100 Days to Offload challenge.

While all eyes are on how Elon Musk is handling the blue checkmark over at Twitter and debating the checkmark's value and devaluing, I submit the checkmark isn't just a Twitter problem but also a social media problem no matter what platform you're using. Over the past couple weeks, I've come to the conclusion that it is a huge mistake to confuse verification with designating someone as notable or not. The use of verification for only notable users, which in turns designates the remaining users as non-notable, is divisive and never should have happened. While I reluctantly have sided with Mr.

At the risk of dating myself, I’ve been writing and posting articles online since the 1980s. Back then we didn’t have the Internet but we did have dial-up modems and bulletin board systems (BBS) hosted by computer enthusiasts. When the Internet, blogging, and self-hosted websites became popular in the late 1990's and early 2000’s I was also there. For awhile I hosted a website focused on content management systems that in its peak easily received over 100,000 unique visitors a month.

Content Management System (CMS), Contensis, whose customers include public sector organizations like police forces, councils, museums and universities, will be part of the UK Government’s G-cloud 13 initiative.

Contensis is a sophisticated API-first CMS, which supports any design that can be built in HTML. It has been part of G-Cloud since version two and has been included in every iteration of the framework for the last ten years.

G-Cloud 13 replaces G-Cloud 12 and will provide software services, together with associated support services, to UK central Government and public sector bodies.

I've been struggling as of late trying to find the time to write articles for my blog and websites. It's actually caused me some stress to not be writing because there is so much I want to say and share. I always feel that I'm so behind in my writing. This has been an ongoing theme for me but it's not because I don't have the time but instead because I have chosen higher priorities with my time than blogging.

 This week WordPress 5.9 was released. As was hinted in the BuddyPress 10.0 article, the most anticipated new feature in this new version of WordPress is full site editing. The Site Editor is a new feature to WordPress that allows block editor users to build their entire site with blocks. Unfortunately, full site editing is only available to content creators that are using a Block theme specifically designed to take advantage of the new feature.