Words

After years of maintaining and hosting my own WordPress and Drupal sites myself, last year I decided to give WordPress.com a trial run for one of my websites. I opted to subscribe to WP's Premium plan over their Business plan. The initial quantity of content for my website was low and I could not justify the higher cost of the Business plan for this site.

Overall, my experience with WordPress.com has been pleasing. While it may be cheaper to host and manage your own website (WordPress is available as free open source software), there is definitely less hassle with letting WordPress the service do the heavy lifting for you. I can see a day coming where I host all my WordPress sites on WordPress.com.

Summer is a distraction. While promises of consistent blogging are easy to make here in South Dakota when temperatures are below freezing, the true test of a blogger is spending time in front of the computer when the warm sunny skies of summer are on us. The successful blogger is one that posts consistently and routinely throughout the year. The ideal blogger puts the readers first before himself or herself. Regular readers of my blog already know this but for the record let me state it anyway, I'm not that blogger.

My blog posts were far and few between this past summer. With no regrets, I traded that blogging time for probably the busiest and greatest summer of my lifetime. Weeks of experiences that wouldn't have been seen if I spent the same time with keyboard under my hands instead of a walking stick in my hand.

A couple weeks ago I rode my Can-Am Spyder southward from Sioux Falls to Lennox, headed west to Parker then looped north back to home. On my trip, I stopped by Chancellor, SD for a photo opportunity. My Spyder hit 3000 miles while on this trip and I wanted to record the occasion.

Good news, the new Rykers by Can-Am are selling well. While I own a Spyder and not a Ryker...it's good to see that when a good price point is offered the people will buy.

Total revenue from year-round products — which consist of side-by-sides, ATVs, and three-wheeled vehicles — was up 17% year over year, to $445.6 million. North American sales of year-round products increased in the low-20% range.

Valcourt, Canada-based BRP credited its growth with a higher volume of side-by-sides sold and the introduction of the three-wheeled Can-Am Ryker. In the U.S., BRP side-by-sides experienced sales growth in the high teens, ahead of the industry, which was up a low single-digit percentage, according to BMO Capital Markets Analyst Gerrick Johnson.

A week ago Twitter offered to upgrade my Twitter account (@socpub) to a new design for its Web Interface. For the most part, I've been viewing the revamped interface via the Chrome browser through a Windows 10 PC. After intense use of the new interface this past weekend, I have to say so far so good. In fact, I have no real complaints about the changes Twitter has made...which is highly unusual for me when it comes to social media.

Interesting misfire of EU's Article 11 (according to Google). Article 11 is a proposed EU Copyright directive that would prevent quite a bit of the caching of content and inclusion of content Google does with its News pages.

According to Google:

After nearly eight years of being a Google+ user, the time to say goodbye to the social network is almost here. For those of you that never saw the value of Google+, I  don't expect you to fully understand what hardcore users (I'm one of them) will be missing when the platform is no more. I think Mike Elgan's article probably describes Google+ best when he explains it as a place "where smart people gather for long, detailed and interesting conversations" without the streams being "algorithmically filtered" like most social networks.

This winter I'll be relying on my newly purchased EGO Power+ Snow Blower to clear the snow off the driveway. However, this EGO snow blower isn't my first battery-powered snow blower as that honor goes to Snow Joe's first two-stage 80V Cordless Snow Blower, the iON24SB-XR (Amazon affiliate link).

Given my continuous obsession with the EGO Power+ product line, I couldn't resist buying this new product by EGO. The new EGO Power+ Nexus Power Inverter just arrived at my doorstep. This new 150 Watt Inverter should be a nice convenient addition for whenever I need need backup power indoors to run my smaller devices.

All of EGO's current line of 56 Volt Batteries will work with the Nexus. The power inverter provides two USB ports and one AC port. While 150 Watts isn't a huge amount of power it's enough to power a tablet and laptop while out and about, lamps in the house, and even your TV and router in a power outage. While run time will vary, there are a number of reviews showing people powering their television for a few hours off  a single 5.0 Ah or 7.5 Ah EGO battery.

Your hosting account was found to be causing an overload of MySQL resources. What can you do? Upgrade your Drupal 8 website to Drupal 8.4 or higher.

One of my goals in rebranding my website from CMS Report to socPub was to write diverse articles beyond the topic of content management systems. Yet, here we go again with another CMS related article. The Drupal open source project recently made available Drupal 8.4 and for me this version has been a long time coming as it addresses some long standing frustrations I've had with Drupal 8 from the perspective of a site administrator. While Drupal 8.4 adds some nice new features, I'm just as excited about the bug fixes and performance improvements delivered in this new version of Drupal.