FN · August 14, 2026
Long Strange Trip XIII: Dead North (2026)
The final part: founding Dead North LLC — why the name, why now, why published prices and a rescue practice, and what thirteen years assembled into.
FN · August 13, 2026
Colophon: how this site is built (and why hosting it costs about nothing)
deadnorth.io under the hood: static Astro with React islands, markdown for content, Cloudflare Workers for the form and the daily radar, no CMS, no database, near-zero hosting bill.
FN 07 · August 5, 2026
What website maintenance costs in MN, WI, ND & IL (2026, with receipts)
The real Upper Midwest maintenance price distribution, surveyed from published pricing pages: the $40–$395 commodity band, the $475–$3,950 professional band, and the $2,500+ Drupal specialist tier.
FN · July 29, 2026
Long Strange Trip XII: Building the robot (2026)
Part twelve: V.I.N.CENT — turning fleet-era conviction into an observability agent watching 327 production sites, and what building your own instruments does to a builder.
FN · July 23, 2026
Long Strange Trip XI: The fleet era (2024–2025)
Part eleven: backend engineering for media properties measured in millions of monthly visits, and the shift from thinking in sites to thinking in fleets.
FN · July 10, 2026
V.I.N.CENT: watching 327 sites without watching 327 dashboards
Notes from building fleet observability: archive what the platform discards, judge each site against its own history, and keep the loud tier quiet enough to mean something.
FN 03 · June 17, 2026
So you inherited a Drupal site: the 2026 survival guide
New job, old Drupal site, no documentation? How to tell which Drupal version you're running, the five checks to run first, and when a $2,500 assessment beats guessing.
FM · June 9, 2026
The handoff checklist: leaving a developer well (in either direction)
The complete transfer list when a website changes hands — what the departing developer delivers, what the owner verifies, and how both sides walk away clean.
FN 05 · June 8, 2026
Taking over a Drupal site from a previous developer: the technical checklist
The developer-to-developer handoff checklist for inherited Drupal: composer and git state, drush access, config export status, and what to do when there's no repo at all.
FN · June 4, 2026
Long Strange Trip X: Back to school (2024)
Part ten: finishing the NDSU computer science degree eleven years into the career it describes — why bother, what the classroom looks like from the far side of production, and what it closed.