Bryan Ruby

First Name
Bryan
Last Name
Ruby

Member for

18 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 as well as on Bluesky.

Latest Posts

Off Topic: The Oldest and Newest AC/DC Vinyl Albums in the Ruby Collection

It was early 1981 and my Dad received an offer from Columbia House to join the Columbia Records Club. For one penny a person could get eleven vinyl records by joining this music club. Better yet, fill in the "secret bonus" 12th box with your album of choice and you got an additional album for free. Nevermind the marketing ploy here that you would be committed to buy additional albums at full catalog price in the months to follow...my dad was about to receive a dozen albums from his favorite bands all at once. So many albums were about to come through the door, that my Dad let my sister and me each pick out a record for ourselves. Whether my Dad liked my choice or not I can't remember, but I picked AC/DC's Back in Black.

socPub: Relaunching CMS Report and having fun at the After Work Pub

It make take awhile but when I make a mistake I will eventually admit and correct the error of my ways. Half a decade ago, I turned my back on supporting niche websites and focused all my effort in creating a new multi-topic website which you now know as socPub. As counter-intuitive that it sounds, the more diverse and interesting topics we published under this website, our number of loyal visitors to the website decreased in numbers. I found this analysis to be alarming and discouraging.

End of Life for Drupal 8

This is old news but I thought still worth mentioning. Last month Drupal 8 reached its end-of-life. This means that all versions of Drupal 8 core and Drupal contributed project releases that are compatible with only Drupal 8 have been marked unsupported and are no longer supported by the Drupal security team.

Drupal 8.0.0 was first released on November 9, 2015. The last version was released on November 17, 2021. With the end of life approaching, I also updated my two websites from Drupal 8 to Drupal 9.

My Lack of Blogging in a Pandemic

Blogging has always been a way for me to express myself creatively as I hide away in my home office for "me time". Unfortunately, the COVID-19 Pandemic changed all that with my day job requiring maximum telework which in turn transformed my creative personal space into a remote office that work owned eight hours a day. For my mental and physical health, once those work hours are up I have made the conscious decision to walk away from the computer. I now find it more necessary to find something else to do that doesn't involve screen time. This shift in priorities unfortunately reduced my writing time.

Bryan Ruby: My 31-Day Blogging Challenge

Life has a way of distracting us from our goals. Four years ago when I decided to retire CMS Report, I did so in the hope for opportunity to find a new voice in my online presence. It didn't work out so well. Instead of being more creative in my writings, I spent more time maintaining the nuts and bolts to my websites and publishing other people's articles than I did expressing my own thoughts and ideas. I know for many of you, you find yourself in a similar predicament.

Happy IT Professional Day? #ITProDay

I'm not really sure this is a thing but Twitter thinks to seem so. According to my sources, IT Professional Day is celebrated on the third Tuesday in September of every year. Honestly, this is the first year I've heard of this national/international day but a quick search shows that quite a bit of those in my profession are celebrating this day. So given that national and international days have been given to every breed of cat and dog imaginable, I say why not elevate us IT folks with our own day of celebration?