7 Minute Miles

17 years of web publishing


Just like kottke.org, this site is celebrating an anniversary this week. The first post on 7minutemiles.com was published 17 years ago today. If that wasn’t enough to make me feel super old, I also recently discovered that per ICANN, 7minutemiles.com has a creation timestamp of 2002-11-26T19:08:46Z.

Damn. 20 years.

It looks like I didn’t publish an anniversary post in 2022, so let’s look at what’s happened since the 2021 update:

  • Jumped from 12,192 posts to 28,918 (largely due to the new Twitter archive)
  • Still have 201 published pages, but cleaned up and dropped a few
  • FINALLY moved to a mobile-friendly, responsive theme (intro post, longer post)

I had a draft post sitting around forever about my current AWS virtual server setup, but it’s been so long now that none of the processes to recreate it are probably valid any longer. I’ll just say that I’m very happy with the current environment and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend their Lightsail and Route 53 offerings to anyone who wants to experiment with the Amazon cloud. Currently running one instance in Ohio Zone A with 4 GB RAM, 2 vCPUs, 80 GB SSD and Ubuntu 20.04.

WordPress turns twenty later this year and I’m chugging along on the latest 6.2 version (although still with the Classic Editor plugin and no Gutenberg). The new theme helped me get current on PHP (8.2.4) and my backend is running on nginx 1.18.0, with MySQL drop-in replacement MariaDB 10.3.38. The cert process is now fully automated using Let’s Encrypt and so far Just Works™.

Still haven’t really looked at any web server traffic log options for nginx, so let’s take a quick peek at the WordPress.com stats for 2022: 6,843 visitors with 21,664 views and 1,032 likes (which I didn’t even know was a thing). Taking all of those numbers with a large grain of salt, but it is interesting to see that the Spring Hill post got bumped down to the #2 spot (only one view behind the Brian Christopher post).

Thanks for visiting!

Originally published by DK on March 30, 2023 at 6:00 am in Housekeeping, Longform, Technology


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