It’s entirely possible that this site is now working as well as it was before I moved it to a new server.
The previous hosts, TextDrive decided to shut up shop in a hurry (a long story) and, like many others, I had less than two weeks to move most of my sites to a new server. Everything but Pepys and the Tumblrs.
Most of it took about 16 hours in total — I kept track because I was curious. A lot of it went more smoothly than expected, with plenty of things working once a few file paths were changed. Assuming we ignore the twelve hours during which my family’s email failed.
The most complicated was my own site, a historic tangle of Movable Type, a lot of custom PHP, two databases, and a bunch of scripts. I’m amazed how much still works, after a little encouragement, given its age. I would still like to rationalise all this into one codebase, like I did with Pepys just over a year ago, which is now a much more coherent single Django site. But, you know, finite time.
The 16 hours didn’t include re-writing the Perl script which took my links from Pinboard and made a daily Movable Type blog post from them. The extremely helpful support at WebFaction, my new home, were unable to work out how to get the DBD::mysql module installing correctly. Eventually it seemed simpler to rewrite that in Python (on GitHub, in the unlikely event you’re in the same situation), leaving me gloriously free of any Perl scripts, if we don’t look in the direction of all of Movable Type.
It’s times like this that I think of whenever I consider registering a new domain name, or starting a new project. They all seem like good ideas when you begin but if you have any desire to keep things online and working for years (never mind decades) this tedious operation is the ever-increasing overhead required.
For the record, this time around I had to move these sites:
- My own site
- My mum’s site
- Other stuff on this domain like Domesday Witham, the Hiragana and Katakana test, a bunch of archived GeoCities sites and the 1995 HotWired demo site.
- Mary’s site
- Today’s Guardian
- Whit Stillman
- Barbican Talk
- Overmorgen
- My old acting site
- Pretend Office
- Septivium
- My friend Simon’s old site
- Where is STML?
Hmm, 16 hours doesn’t seem too bad I guess.
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