Well so nearly a year later and I finally got a few minutes to start blogging again. Actually today I spent a bunch of time just getting this blog tuned up again and setting up a few things so I can easily access the Azure account it runs on.

Working for Microsoft you have to deal with some weird things that not everybody experiences. For instance when I am at my desk I am logged in to my Microsoft corporate account. I have lots of Azure subscriptions, an MSDN subscription and an Office 365 subscription that hang off of those credentials. I also have an MSDN subscription that is tied to my Microsoft Account credentials which are different and that MSDN subscription has an Azure subscription within it (Azure Benefits). The problem I have is that I cannot access that Azure subscription when I am logged in with my corporate credentials because for some reason I can’t associate my Hotmail account with my corporate account. So today, in order to work around that I went and created a Windows VM using my Azure subscription with my corporate credentials and then use that to access my Azure subscription with my Hotmail credentials, which I should point out, CAN access my Microsoft corporate Azure subscriptions.

Are you getting confused? Is this feeling like some kind of weird recursion? Good, because it is and I’m confused as well.

So within my VM now I access my Hotmail MSDN subscription which this blog is running under. I went and updated some settings in the Azure Management Portal, upgraded it to a Standard Medium-sized instance. Turned on Backups (see my first blog post), turned Always On, well- ON, changed the PHP version to PHP 5.5 (btw, did you know that PHP 5.5 is smoking fast on Windows now. It’s true) and I tweaked some other stuff. I then logged into wp-admin and went to work crap canning about 5M pieces of spam comments, got an akismet key and turned that on, updated to WordPress 3.9, updated my plug ins, blah, blah, blah.

Next I’m going to fix any broken widgets then get to work customizing this theme. Should be fun. Get to maybe hack a little php again which is always a good time.