My blogging has fallen off as of late, mostly because one of the biggest items on my to-do list has been migrating the whole thing over to a new host. After returning from a 2-week vacation to the East Coast and Carribean, I had 5 posts outlined and ready to go. I got on last night to tackle the first, only to find that my old blog was in complete disarray. While I was gone, it seems as though Yahoo decided to finally upgrade from WordPress 2.0.2 to the latest version (2.8.4, I think). While I applaud them for finally upgrading it, the process could’ve been handled a little more smoothly. Over the years, I’d cobbled together a boatload of little tweaks and adjustments to my WP install, all of which were now gone. That in itself isn’t as bad as it sounds–most of the hacks were tweaks to simulate newer WP functionality. Where it totally sucks, though, is how they handled the upgrade. Instead of simply dumping the new files over the old ones they completely wiped out my blog directory and copied ONLY the wp-content folder. Because of the poor 2.0.2 install on Yahoo’s host, I never bothered with using the built-in content management system for blog images. I just added a ‘/images’ folder to my blog install and manually uploaded anything I wanted to include in a post. All of those images are now gone (and not backed up anywhere), so the vast majority of my old posts are now imageless.
That was the final push I needed to kick Yahoo’s hosting to the curb, but there are more changes here than the domain itself. The whole blog had been getting more and more bloated as I added games and pages, so a reboot was certainly in order. Instead of trying to be some sort of weird amalgamation of self-made-portal and blog and repository for old classwork, this site is now just a blog. The games are still up and playable, but the 100 or so hits a day they were getting is hardly worth the effort of maintaining a bastardized WP install. The new “Games” tab is much more portfolio-like and generally much cleaner than the old site. I’ve also ditched all the ads until traffic is more impressive. I’m sure there will be some bugs and broken links (and as soon as the domain transfers I’ll try to get some 301s up), but now that the Great Upgrade of 2009 is complete I can finally get back to doing some writing.
Upcoming posts include two new games launched, a review milestone at WTP, why I decided to kill one site, and a brand new site that a friend and I just launched. Stay tuned!
UPDATE: Well, looks like I hit the perfect storm of domain transfer FAIL. Dreamhost was having hiccups on their registration server which sort of left the old site in limbo (it normally takes a week or so anyway, but this tacked on another few days). They finally got things sorted out and the transfer went through last night. 301s and such should be up and running now!