When I left Blogger for WordPress in 2016, I made a deliberate choice to leave some features behind. Part of the allure of WordPress was the opportunity to explore PHP and to take as much ownership as I could over the inner workings of my blog. Blogger, by nature, never provided the level of customizability I was searching for, but the the chance to write my own custom WordPress theme was too appealing to pass up. Suddenly, I had the ability to customize, rewrite, and (more often than not) break almost everything that governed how my content was displayed on the Web.

Taking control did not come without tradeoffs. As previously mentioned, I never implemented comments, and until my massive update in May of this year I had some minor SEO problems like poorly apportioned <h1> tags. However, I had a platform that allowed me to experiment with web technologies on a much larger scale than before.

That was fine, because that was the point. I don’t blog for ad revenue, or to become famous (though I have my doubts that running a technology blog is really the quickest path to Internet fame). Regardless, in the spirit of constant improvement, I’ve been slowly adding features to my blog as I feel it needs them.

Once I finished some SEO work and some performance optimization, the next task was to fix the comments. I’ve implemented the generic WordPress comments template and enabled the discussion section for everything but my archived posts. In fact, I can tell it’s working, because I’ve already blocked dozens of Russian spam comments. Please enjoy.

On Monday, CentOS 7.6 (1810) became generally available for download. CentOS 7.6 follows the October release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6, as CentOS is the open source community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

A list of changes, deprecated features, and known issues can be found in the release notes for 7.6. Notably, the golang package is no longer included in the default CentOS repositories, and instead must be installed from the EPEL testing repository as discussed in the release notes.

You can trigger an upgrade to CentOS 7.6 in one step by running:

yum clean all && yum update

The upgrade requires a reboot to load the new kernel version. After upgrading, you can check your new distribution and kernel versions by running cat /etc/system-release and uname -r, respectively.