Blog issues

Now resolved!

So, in the past months, some of you may have noticed that this website was famously no longer reachable, or was stumbling on some weird landing page with nowhere to go. I will admit, the downtime was never meant to be that long. 🙁

What happened behind the scene is that I decided to let go of my hosting package with the former hosting service I had, and get started on self hosting services.
…..What….a…..journey….

I am happy to report that, as of the 10th of August (yesterday), the blog service is back online properly!
There has been a few ‘incidents’ that made the migration WAY longer than expected. So, shall we dig a little deeper in my ‘fucks up’ ? (so ultimately if you decide to do something similar, you don’t forget step in the same mud pits that I did…)

First problem: I downloaded a file copy of my web server files, including the blog. I didn’t <<Export>> the blog from WordPress… This was my biggest issue. I was lucky enough to have a caching plugin installed that made a HTML with almost every pages available from the PHP calls (this saved this blog, really). Although, I had to manually go through EACH cached file in notepad++, copy the text chunk by chunk in between the HTML tags and paste it in the new WordPress instance. This process felt like forever… but a few (I haven’t counted, could be lots) hours after, I had all my posts back with their dates, content, categories, images, etc. I even had to fetch some old posts from the Wayback machine since the cache system didn’t had them loaded.

Second problem: I realized that all the fixes I did to the theme, had been kept in the SQL WordPress database, which I (like an idiot) forgot to duplicate before removing the hosting service. That means I had to reinstall all the plugins I could recall, reconfigure them and try to redo all the changes I had done in the past. Please keep in mind that this is the reason why some stuff may look different or are not exactly the same vs the previous iteration.

Third problem: Self hosting is quite an interesting beast to tame, especially for somebody that mostly done programming and electronics. Although, after spending a lot of hours figuring things out, I think I got most of bumps under control. I’ll probably do a post or two on the topic in the future as this has been quite a learning experience for me (especially setting up a hardware router from scratch, or configuring proxies and virtual machines).

And finally, All these together made the task a bit more difficult and daunting. Motivation was not at it highest in the past months, so once again, please excuse me for ‘disappearing’ from the face of the internet for a little bit.

On the bright side, I have quite a few things that happened in these past months that I’ll have to write about! Be sure to check again soon!