There are mnay funny things happening on the Mother Ship.
The 100DaysOfSteem promotion ended on July 11. The next day, corporate announced a new promo called "The 1000 Days of Steem" which is to start on August 1. The central feature of the promo was TheDiaryGame challenge. Players are to write a diary post every day for the duration of the promo.
The original post asked for a diary post every day for 1000 days ... 2 3/4 years.
Imagine writing a post every day for 2 & 3/4 years. Egads. That is quite a challenge.
I couldn't do it.
Anyway, I've been looking for a justification to relaunch the game. In this game one records their daily steps. The player's vagabond spirit jumps from its sedentary host to take walk about around the world. For every step a player takes in the real world, the vagabond spirit takes a step in a map based on Open Street Map.
In this game one records their steps once day. Such a program could run for a thousand days!
Computers are amazing things. They can stay away for years at a time.
Anyway, I decided to relaunch the Vagabond Spirit game in conjunction with The1000DaysOfSteem.
Before the relaunch, I need to upgrade the server. My current site started with Ubuntu's Trusty Tahr which I upgraded to Xenial Xerus. The code is written for PHP 7.0. Since I am jumping up several releases, I decided to start with a new installation.
I think I will stick with PHP.net as the host.
I am thinking of using Debian "Buster" release as the OS. An Apache server. The code will be in PHP 7.4. I will SQLite3 for the database. As everyone is in love with blockchain technology, I am thinking of creating an "open ledger" with simple flat files as part of the game.
I will use a TLS certificate from Let's Encrypt
I was extremely unhappy with the PHP 7.0 release. I had a ton of problems with the PDO database object. I seriously thought of abandoning PHP and writing the program in C, Rust or Python. The PHP works and is good enough.
I believe in lightweight code on lightweight servers. I appreciate comments or suggestions on the start up.
Anyway, for the image I snapped a photo of a local running track and pasted logos for Debian, PHP and SQLite on the track.