Weird notifications and site update

Sorry to anyone who received weird emails notifications today. I was doing a bit of housecleaning, which triggered comment notifications that I was not expecting.

This is worthwhile opportunity for me to share that I am finally working on upgrading migrating this site from the current software it is running on. 

I've had conversations with different folks about it over the years, but to recap: this site is running on the open source CMS Drupal. Drupal version 7, in fact. Drupal 8 was released over 8 years ago. But rather than being a minor upgrade, Drupal 8 was in fact a ground up rewrite of the system. The data structures and the concepts remained mostly the same, but the code was almost totally rewritten. Most pertinent here, there was no upgrade process offered for Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. You have to "migrate" your site to Drupal 8, which more or less means rebuilding the site and then slurping over the content of the posts, comments, and pages. It is a cumbersome process. I work with Drupal often in my day job and while I'm good at it these migrations are still a very time consuming undertaking. I've put off migrating TFL for years now, hoping a cheaper, easier, better solution would emerge, but I really haven't found anything that I thought was a better fit for this site (and my skills managing it). So I am biting the bullet and starting work on the migration here, which includes dusting some cobwebs off the existing site, which is what I was trying to do today when I triggered those notifications.

My first order of business is getting the content across and rendering OK in the new system. Over the years I've used a number of different tools to allow people to embed images and format their posts, so getting it all processed correctly and carried over is quite a bit of work. Once that process is in decent shape, I'll start building up the new site, which means making it look nice, have decent landing pages and navigation, getting search, messaging, and notifications working again, those sorts of things. When it gets to that point, I'll likely set up a new site/server and offer folks who want an opportunity to check it out and give me feedback before making the final switch over to the new system. I'm still at least a couple of weeks from having something to share though, more likely not until September or October.

I'm hopeful the new system will be cleaner and easier to use, particularly on mobile devices. 8 years ago about 25% of the site traffic came from people on mobile devices. Now it is over 75%. This site just isn't optimized for that.