I have good news and bad news. Good news is we are not only back up, but I completely trashed my old Centos 7 Linux server with Mysql 5 in favor of Alma Linux 8 with Mysql 8. It’s clear that it runs much smoother. I’m not a great Linux/MySql guy but I am learning. The bad news is the damn old database is in my possession but pretty useless. I’ve tried some things to get the data out of it, even spent some money on a tool but no dice.
You’ll also notice the different look and feel. If we have to rebuild, then might as well go whole hog. While we still use good old WordPress as our engine, the theme and plugins are going to be different. We used to use a theme called Newspaper which had this whole back end designer called TagDiv. (You gurus can tell me where I’m mis-identifying all this stuff.) In any case, Newspaper and TagDiv seemed to always be finnicky from the get-go all those years ago. I think in combination with a difficulty in upgrading and how it worked, the size of everything finally contributed to the downfall. We did have a nice influx of new readers recently but I don’t believe the traffic was the cause. You may have seen various outages leading up to this.
So we are rebuilding. I think in the long run, this will be a sleeker, smoother and more stable site. But as we are all just a bunch of guys doing all this in our spare time, it was bound to have set backs along the way. I appreciate all of your patience as we work through this. We’ll be back. Better than ever.
