Migration of this website from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9
I use this website as an archive of my scientific publications and as a place to post occasional observations on life, the world, and whatever comes my way. It's all very indulgent at this point.
Drupal 7 to Drupal 9
I've just completed migrating the site from Drupal 7 to Drupal 9, which was more work than certainly I'd have liked. But Drupal 7 is way out of date now, and they say future upgrades will be pretty painless. We'll see about that.
I looked at porting over to WordPress, which is an excellent CMS. I host a WP website for a friend but had no real experience building a website with it. I found getting a basic website up and running with WP was pretty easy and I'd recommend it to someone getting started with a small website. But after a while I realized Drupal was actually much better at some things. Drupal's Custom Content Types and Views modules are really powerful and to do similar things in WordPress press requires paying for plug-ins, which can be a costly rabbit hole.
And too, I've already invested in the Drupal learning curve. So for me, I think it was better to stick with Drupal despite the fact I had to rebuild a lot to get a Drupal 9 site working roughly like my previous site.
Abandoning BOA: Barracuda-Octopus-Aegir
Since 2006, I think, I've been using a VPS from Digitalocean.com provisioned with BOA to host my Drupal websites. BOA is installed on a fresh server, taking over just about everything about managing and tuning the needed server software, and provides a front-end for managing Drupal installations. It made spinning up a new Drupal website an easy matter of a few clicks. Really, a lifesaver when I was hosting quite a few Drupal sites for clients.