Today, March 8, 2024, as I celebrate twelve years of creating my sosAssociates.com blog, I am expecting that this year will be much different than last year - which is a good thing. A year ago, I started my sosAssociates.com Blogiversary: Eleven blog post with a quote about change, and stated that I was in the middle of a potentially life-changing situation:
Here are three items of change that I either mentioned or alluded to a year ago in my 2023 Blogiversary blog post that have now been successfully resolved. My new normal for my life is much more stable than a year ago:
As this past year progressed, I moved from first sharing publicly in three blog posts about my diagnosis of and treatment for Hypertrophic Cardiomyopathy (1: Diagnosis, 2: Surgery, 3: Hospital) to then three blog posts about telling my story of HCM recovery on television and on the hospital website (1: WKYC TV-3, 2: Spectrum News One, 3: My HCM story on University Hospitals' blog).
While a year ago I had a section of my Blogiversary blog post mention that there were circumstances beyond my control preventing me from attending any events in January/February 2023, I am now very active locally, and have three adventure trips planned for 2024.
Exactly a year ago, I was writing about "Preparing for Twitter's Uncertain Future," and by October 2023, my Twitterversary was canceled. Instead of celebrating my Twitterversary, I wrote about mourning my loss as the Twitter bird was killed by its owner.
For those who you who have not read my blog posts before June 24, 2023, my blog from the beginning 12 years ago was an extension of my Twitter interests. I would gather what I shared while live tweeting at events to make my blog posts. I have now completely changed how my blog posts are created.
A year ago, I wrote: "Update to Drupal Version 9.5.3 - Preparing for Drupal 10" which took a lot of work, but promised to make future updates easier.
From November 14, 2023, through November 29, 2023, I tried to upgrade from Drupal v9.5.11 to Drupal v10.1.6 on a test website, but I was not happy with the results. While the upgrade worked, I was seeing "Deprecated Function" errors for which I could not find a solution. On December 3, 2023, I saw on the Drupal core release schedule web page that Bugfixes and Drupal 10.2.0 were coming out soon, so I decided to wait until February 2024 to try again. Since my research led me to believe the issue I was seeing was in Drupal Core, I theorized the issues would be fixed as part of the normal Drupal Community Bugfixes.
February 15, 2024 -- success! While in November 2023, I spent half a month trouble-shooting issues (and learning a lot from breaking my test website), I now moved from Drupal v9.5.11 to Drupal v10.2.3 in less than a day. The promise of a year ago of a very easy upgrade process came true.
A secondary problem that I saw in November 2023, and continues today, is that my theme fails when the "Aggregate CSS files" performance function is on. I expect that, since this is a known issue, it will be fixed by the Drupal Community in a future bug fix. My workaround of turning off the aggregation feature for both JavaScript and Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is working.
A year ago, I predicted three changes would occur in 2023. They all happened, and were resolved to my satisfaction.
2023 & 2024 Blog Posts
I want to say thank you to the people responsible for all the great things I was able to do in 2023 and so far in 2024. I have big plans for 2024, which I will continue to share in my future blog posts.
Please take a moment and scroll across the images/links below, and click on them to read some of the 18 blog posts from 2023 and the seven (as compared to only two a year ago due to illness) that I wrote so far in 2024:
Rockin' Science in Cleveland - Martin Luther King, Jr., Day 2023
Belated New Year Thank Yous & 2022 Reflections