The karma of pericarditis, and using Drupal

If karma is defined as “cause and effect,” here’s a little karma of the last 4-5 months:

  • In early November, 2019, I suddenly started having severe chest pain.
  • I happened to be standing next to my computer, so I quickly disabled comments on alvinalexander.com. In case this was something I couldn’t come back from, I didn’t want other people to have to worry about dealing with those (because many of those comments were from spammers, and a huge waste of time).
  • (At the hospital I would find out this was pericarditis, i.e., inflammation around the heart.)
  • Over time I realized that “no comments” meant less stress and less work, so I kept them turned off.
  • One day I realized that if I was going to keep comments turned off, there was no reason to serve pages dynamically with Drupal 8 any more.
  • I took a week to write some Scala scripts to convert Drupal 8 blog content to static web pages.
  • My server CPU use has dropped significantly, so I can reduce my server costs by about $400/year.