I’ve been working to upgrade the plumbing at the backend of my website, not (I must say) particularly out of desire to do this kind of task. Although there is something pleasurable about lining up images and blocks of text online and getting everything just right. Kind of like designing a book. In addition, there is some pleasure in exercising the software muscles that I once used to make a living.

No, the reason here is that my web hosting company will be upgrading my MySQL database because the version I was running was coming to end of its service life—and WPEngine (the web host) is nothing if not a daemon for keeping backend software up to date. Furthermore, I’ll be in Japan when the “upgrade” was scheduled to happen—so this must be dealt with in the here and now, while I am here to deal with it!

So plumbing is a good operative word. Although this switch does allow me to get some things right, or new better and improved; for example, this updated category page of almost ten years of Best-ofs. But mostly it is that feature of modern, software-mediated life: running to stay in place.

Fortunately, I’ve been able to take some Zen breaks, in the case of the Butterfly Ranunculus image below while Phyllis was working on the typography of our new website. With this image, I was pleased to see the form of the image follow (not function) but the name of the flower; you can see why the varietal was thought to resemble the butterfly. Speaking of which, it is good to think of butterflies rising in flight from the chrysalis, just like my website has been forged anew!