I just want to again thank all the folks that have sent donations or signed up for a year via the subscription (or monthly!). You have covered the costs of these licenses (as I found a nice Indian company that sells them at 50% discount so the rest will help cover some of the server upgrades that are coming soon down the pike.
Basically to share this news here for those who are interested it became pretty obvious as I tried to move Model Shipwrights and Automodler to new server instances on Amazon that this process was going to hit a gigantic road block. Normally if I want to upgrade an instance I am copying over a direct copy of the files that makeup a server from one to another. So if we need more storage for example it’s a simple process to move to an instance with more GB. However this is a different scenario as Amazon is doing away with these free Plesk control panel instances so there is no means to do an upgrade like that. The files and database have to be transferred separately. This is totally doable however our content sites are built on a framework (Laravel) that has upgraded many versions from 2020. And this in conjunction with the fact that soon I will not be able to find standard hosting with the PHP version the sites require (7.4) is leading me (once again) realize that having static content management software that is not keeping up with the times is a death sentence. So…
Model Shipwrights and AutoModeler will remain up on their current instances for the near term, but eventually they will be porting over to a new platform (Ghost) that is more managed like our forum software (Discourse) so these update and versioning problems should be solved. However that does mean that I will need to figure out a practicle means of moving some or all of the content from those existing sites to the new platform. That is the part I am only about 20% into as yet. There is a meta file system to export data from one platform to create a file that would import the data into Ghost, but I am not 100% sure all the images would be able to be factored into this import. More on that at a future date.
I will obviously be pretty busy on this for the next few months. And I will let everyone know when one of these new platforms is ready and up for testing.
The good news is that this will likely get me motivated to launch the two new sites I have wanted to build for several years now. FigureModeler.com and 3Dmodeler.net
Cheers,
Jim
