THINGS haven’t been great with my blog over the last week or so. That’s an understatement. I’ve spent a great deal of time working out how to save all the content I’ve put up here for the last five years. I’ve maintained blogs of some sort or another since the late 1990s and more consistently from the mid-2005s. I moved from Blogspot to WordPress about 2012 and then learned how to use a hosting service and use domains. Every couple of years something or other would go wrong and I’d start fresh again. This blog, started in April 2019, is the longest I’ve maintained uninterrupted. I’ve tinkered with it from time to time and changed its appearance. It’s always been a bit of a muddle: neither completely personal or professional and some of the posts would have suited a quick tweet or toot. (I have a clearer methodology now: short posts get published on Mastodon and I import my Mastodon RSS feed as the “Microblog” section of the blog and the right-hand sidebar.)

Last weekend I noticed that I was using over half my hosting space and I set about removing and apps I’d installed and never used and deleting folders (I thought) were unnecessary. All was fine until I noticed that my blog wasn’t loading images. Initially, I thought it was a problem with the cache and, as I was trying to work out what was wrong, realised that WordPress had also update. So, I thought that it was an issue with either a plugin or the theme I used. So I went through the process of deactivating them and looking for the cause of the problem. (At this point, it seemed that the theme I use, SimpleMag, was not working well with the latest version of WordPress, but there were other issues.

So, I started trying different things to get the site working properly. Everything I did seemed to make it worse. I then took the nuclear option of restoring the entire home folder on my web host (I meticulously keep a bi-monthly back-up). Which sort of worked and let me update other apps I use to their latest versions – which was a bonus. After more hours of trial and increasing error, I concluded that the issue was somewhere deep in the WordPress intallation (maybe some lines of code I’d added or altered that were no longer working) plus I’d somehow messed up the databases that ddrive WordPress, so I decided to backup what I had and then do a completely fresh install. My salvation came in the form of a plugin called Backup Migration. It exported everything and, after a fresh wordpress installation, retrieved everything back to 2019 in working order. (I now have evidence that it’s possible to backup and retrieve the site without issue.)

Next hurdle came when the issue with images reappeared – or rather the images disappeared again. It was obvious that the main problem was now the theme. So, I installed the new Twenty Twenty Five theme and have spent a day or so learning how to create templates and make the blog look as much as it used to as I can at this point. Making templates in WordPress isn’t straightforward and I’m still scratching my head about where widgets have gone and why some widgets can be used in certain “blocks” and not others. Getting pages to look how I want is incredibly difficult, though

It’s been a frustrating, time-consuming week but it does mean that I can keep blogging – which I think remains an important part of online culture (it’s well worth reading Jay Springett’s paean extolling the virtues of maintaining a blog) – even if I’m the only audience for my posts.