After being away for a while, I've managed to understand every technical bit of this website which eventually has allowed me to bring it UP again! I'm very pleased with that. Hello world, I'm back! . But even more important is that the gained skills allow me to make this website ubercool once more! Below you'll find some explanation on the technology I'm using.

Although VERY similar on the outside, on the inside lots has changed:

• GIT: First of all, I’ve moved all the custom programming code and that the code of ExpressionEngine, my CMS written in PHP, to ‘GIT’. What is GIT? It’s a way to manages changes in the software. You can compare it a word-document where you can always go back in time to every change. And this for thousands of documents at the same time.
• Docker: instead of having one Mac, one Windows machine or one Linux machine, you literary (can) have hundreds of machine on your laptop, virtually. And even better: you can simply move all these machines with one single mouse click (maybe two ) to the cloud. That implies you can mimic a complex infrastructure on your home computer, even without an internet connection, and then blow your creation to the outer world, to the cloud.
• DigitalOcean: as one of the better cloud providers, it provides an infrastructure to host applications, including docker ‘containers’. So you don’t put code on servers, you push a collection of virtual machines to the DigitalOcean clue and you really have no clue where they really are. Doesn’t really matter, as long as your audience can find it,

Complex

Why did I make life so complex? The steps above are parts of creation of a ‘deployment flow’. That means: I can develop the technology side of my website myself (colors, layout, structure, location of content, behavior on smaller screens) on my local MacBook Pro. Once, I’m satisfying, I can push the changes to my production (public accessible, live) website, with an option to automatically test in between.

I’ve never had that flexibility. Making technical changes to the live website was always a complex task, requiring down time of at least an hour, sometimes even more. Now it can happen in minutes. As a result, I can make changes to the website every week.

Next Steps

You won’t see my first changes very soon however. I first have to streamline some technology on the backend. Then I’ll repair my animated header (used to be written in Flash). Then, I’ll archive this ‘ErwinVanLun.com’ website and I’ll continue with Your Future Is Now 3.0, 3,1, 3.2 etc etc. And obviously, once experienced, I’ll bring my knowledge to my chatbot community website Chatbots.org as they are desperately waiting for innovation. Hold on guys, I’ll be back!