Hey, Daniel here. I apologize for yesterday’s outage. Obviously I should have warned here ahead of time, but it was intended to be a quick patch and upgrade, but it quickly became much more of a nightmare than that. Luckily, I had the site backed up but it wasn’t easy restoring original functionality.
We have some additional services running in the background that are used internally. One of them was falling out of maintenance, but upgrading that required an upgrade to the web server software. While I was well aware of the config changes I would need going ahead, something unexpected happened where replacing the web service also deleted a bunch of WordPress files! I don’t understand how, but it went as far deep as the application installation. Luckily it didn’t touch the very important SQL database and uploads, so everything was safe. I backed it up anyway 😉
Anyway, I figured now could be a good time to talk about some changes that will be coming to the site in the semi-near future.
Needless to say, I set up the original configuration of this site in my last year of high school. While all the old content before 2 years ago is now gone (I didn’t back up then) this is essentially the same site with an identical setup. Now I am a level 2 infrastructure analyst at a multi-billion dollar company. It’s safe to say I know much more now than I did during the original config of this site (however, maintaining this has taught me much of the basis of what I now know).
There are many configs here that are not optimal at all, including some that are really scary and very insecure. So much, in fact, that I understand if some would refuse to login here. It’s self-hosted too, and while it’s convenient to have it nearby and readily available, it’s very prone to failure, error, and poor quality of service.
Therefore, in the coming months, my plans are to build up a new site, hosted by not-me with proper security, better organization, and without all the cruft that I got from messing around with things I barely was able to comprehend. This will probably be available starting Q1 2017. I’ll be working on it in the background before actually going live. I will also go ahead and copy over the important data to the new site – things like posts, downloads, users, and other little things I forgot.
I’m looking forward to this transition and the challenges I’ll face on the way. Thanks for sticking with us! I think I’ll be starting a regular ‘site news’ post here maybe monthly. Be watching for more news (and surprises) coming soon.
Side note from CW: Oh, hey, I’m like two and a half weeks late now. Sorry about that. My schedule has been a little irregular lately, but the next article is in the works. It’s going to be a longer one, too. So stick around.