TL;DR
Sometimes the easiest solution is the best solution
A couple of months ago, I was playing with various content management systems (also known as “blogging tools”) on my Raspberry Pi 500, and foolishly decided to create a new website (named “LifeBitsBlog.com” to differentiate it from “LifeBits.blog”) to talk about current projects I’m playing with. It seemed important to segregate the retro stuff that is the raison d’etre of LifeBits from the new stuff… like the Raspberry Pi 500, a new toy called the PocketTerm 35 (which has a Raspberry Pi 5 inside), various experiments with LoRa (which I wrote about here in a post about ham radio), re-exploring ham radio with a sub-$20 handheld, and so on.
For that site, I decided to install the Joomla CMS on the Raspberry Pi and it’s been a very good tool… until today. I was trying to log into my administrator dashboard and for some reason, Joomla decided that my user name or password (or the passkey I had set up) was totally alien to it. That’s the error message you see at the top of this post. I had used the credentials successfully a dozen times in the past few months, but apparently made no difference to Joomla.
With many of the content management systems I’ve used, there are simple and secure “back doors” that can be used to regain access in a situation like this. Joomla presented me with several options, which all frankly seemed like way too much work. The fact that the instructions to recover an Joomla admin password fill a long web page was enough to make me say “Nope. Not gonna do it.”
I’m retired. I teach (and take) some exercise classes. I have hobbies. I travel a lot. I’m the webmaster for a large aerospace company’s retiree group. So do I really want to spend even a couple of hours fighting Joomla? The answer is… not really.
I thought about installing WordPress on the Raspberry Pi. I’ve used that CMS for 20 years and have set up more websites with it than I can remember, but it would probably end up running slowly and take up more space than I’d like on that little computer. Then I thought about creating a “sub-Substack” to LifeBits for the new stuff… which would cost me $50 for moving the lifebitsblog.com domain name over to Substack. Considering this is a non-profit enterprise, spending $50 would cut into my beer fund.
Do you get the feeling that I overthink a lot of things that aren’t important? You’re right!
The easiest solution? I’ll post the current projects here on good old LifeBits along with the retro stuff.
No need to go through gyrations to try to get Joomla to recognize me again
No working on setting up a WordPress install on the RPi only to have it run slowly
No need for you, the wonderful readers of this blog, to have to go to two different sites to read stuff
TL;DR? Expect to see more post about current tech here on LifeBits, since I have been playing with a lot of new techie toys. What about the handful of articles that were previously on LifeBitsBlog.com? I’ll copy ‘em over here and re-publish them with the original date.