Bryan Ruby

First Name
Bryan
Last Name
Ruby

Member for

17 years 11 months
About

Bryan Ruby is owner and writer for the socPub and founded the original site as CMSReport.com in 2006. He works full time as information technologist and is a former meteorologist with the National Weather Service. Additional websites Bryan writes for include his own blog and a new website that he can't seem to get off the ground called Powered by Battery. Despite a history of writing for niche blogs, his interests are eclectic and includes family, camping, bicycling, motorcycling, hiking, and listening to music.

Bryan can also be found on Medium's Mastodon instance.

Latest Posts

Drupal 10 and the socPub Family of Websites

During the past seven days I've been upgrading our websites from Drupal 9 to Drupal 10. There are four of them which includes socPub, CMS Report, INFOTECH Pub, and After Work Pub. While one is never quite done with the work, we're quickly moving from the upgrade back to the maintenance phase of these website. As the dust settles down it will soon be time to start focusing on the content and presence of these websites.

Moving to Drupal 10 in November

With support for Drupal 9 fast coming to a close, we'll be upgrading our various websites to Drupal 10 in the month of November. In April 2006, I chose Drupal to build this site, originally known only as CMS Report, with a beta version of Drupal 4.7.  Along the way, except for a detour in the 2010s when we relied on the Agility CMS for a few years, Drupal has been our content management system of choice.

Bryan Ruby: Out with the Old, In with the New

This past month I replaced a line of Hi-Fi speakers I've listened to and enjoyed for the past 20 years with a pair of new floor speakers from Klipsch. It's an acknowledgment that my hearing and tastes have changed and it's time to listen to my music through a new stereo system. This recognition of needing to do things differently has become a common theme for me lately. I'm finding the old ways aren't working and perhaps joy can be found again by doing something new. With this theme on change, instead of blogging only when I'm inspired by great ideas or events, I decided to blog every few days as I take part in the 100 Days to Offload challenge.

The Social Media Checkmarks and Verification Mess

While all eyes are on how Elon Musk is handling the blue checkmark over at Twitter and debating the checkmark's value and devaluing, I submit the checkmark isn't just a Twitter problem but also a social media problem no matter what platform you're using. Over the past couple weeks, I've come to the conclusion that it is a huge mistake to confuse verification with designating someone as notable or not. The use of verification for only notable users, which in turns designates the remaining users as non-notable, is divisive and never should have happened. While I reluctantly have sided with Mr.

Mastodon: The Long Way Back to Medium

At the risk of dating myself, I’ve been writing and posting articles online since the 1980s. Back then we didn’t have the Internet but we did have dial-up modems and bulletin board systems (BBS) hosted by computer enthusiasts. When the Internet, blogging, and self-hosted websites became popular in the late 1990's and early 2000’s I was also there. For awhile I hosted a website focused on content management systems that in its peak easily received over 100,000 unique visitors a month.

LED Panel Lights In My Garage

The other day I witnessed a children's story time that showed a picture of an incandescent light bulb symbolizing an idea. At that moment I thought to myself, pretty soon these kids will have no idea what a traditional light bulb looks like as they get replaced with more modern lights. Take for instance my own garage where I recently replaced the last of my light bulbs with LED Garage Ceiling lights that aren't bulbs but now LED lights composed of 6 adjustable LED panels. So it goes, time has moved on in my own house.

My Beelink U59 Pro Mini PC with an Intel N5105

A few months ago, I purchased the Beelink U59 Pro Mini PC with only a few reviews available at the time. Despite being a longtime Windows and Linux PC I've been skeptical of the mini PC market  in general and have avoided making a purchase in the past. So much skepticism that my first introduction to this small form factor was last year's purchase of an Apple Mac Mini M1 despite not being a huge fan of the macOS operating system. Luckily, this Beelink Mini PC has convinced me that "small is better" for Windows and Linux as well.

CMS Contensis Approved for G-Cloud 13

Content Management System (CMS), Contensis, whose customers include public sector organizations like police forces, councils, museums and universities, will be part of the UK Government’s G-cloud 13 initiative.

Contensis is a sophisticated API-first CMS, which supports any design that can be built in HTML. It has been part of G-Cloud since version two and has been included in every iteration of the framework for the last ten years.

G-Cloud 13 replaces G-Cloud 12 and will provide software services, together with associated support services, to UK central Government and public sector bodies.

A Qwiizlab USB C Hub for the Mac Mini M1

A year ago I purchased for home use Apple's Mac Mini M1 with 512 GB SSD built into the computer. Coming more from a Windows and Linux background, it wasn't the operating system or Apple services that lured me to make the purchase but instead its small footprint in both size and presence. While the Mac Mini is a neat computer on its own, there are a couple tradeoffs. The negatives include fewer ports and the lack of ability to upgrade both memory and internal storage. I was afraid to turn this around, I was looking at unattractive cables to external devices spread across my desktop making that "small footprint" no more.

Bryan Ruby: Being in the Present Moment

I've been struggling as of late trying to find the time to write articles for my blog and websites. It's actually caused me some stress to not be writing because there is so much I want to say and share. I always feel that I'm so behind in my writing. This has been an ongoing theme for me but it's not because I don't have the time but instead because I have chosen higher priorities with my time than blogging.