So this is going to be a little different than most of my posts, as this is just going to be completely unrelated to what I normally want to talk about here — namely our house and the technology we’re looking to add to it. I’d hoped to spend some time getting down to work on JARVIS in earnest, but ran into some issues before I ever got there.
So a little background here — I initially started toying with the idea of this blog back a couple years ago but it was going to be much different, in large part because we were just living in a small apartment in northeast Los Angeles instead of a 1500 square foot three story house in western Pennsylvania. It was going to be more about building virtual spaces (which I still intend on diving into at some point, but I digress), and so I bought the domain and secured web hosting. I started planning some things out for it. I even interviewed some friends in the Star Wars community to talk about the guild’s flagship (which will one day see the light of day somewhere, hopefully).
Anyway, fast forward to 2024, and just as I start this blog in earnest (finally), I find I need to transfer my domain and hosting to a new account. Long story short, I’d previously set up my hosting and domain through someone who has now gotten out of the web design business entirely, so I just needed to transfer from the old account to a new one that I would manage myself.
Backed up my site and downloaded the backup. Imported it into the new empty site on my new account. Then I transferred the domain over to the new account and played the nameserver game and all that, so the site would continue to show up.
Simple as that.
It was not as simple as that 🤦♂️
I actually had to take the site down for most of the week. First the URL didn’t propagate to DNS properly (it should take less than 72 hours; it took five days). Then it came up and all was well for about five minutes. Until a code error on my part blowing it all up.
When I say it blew it all up, I mean I eventually had to delete it all and re-import from my previous backup. Luckily I didn’t lose any of my (meager amount of) content because the schedule was dark while I was moving it. But when I loaded it up again and applied the same Theme, all hell broke loose again.
Clearly there were some conflicts that I couldn’t resolve on my own. I mean, I’ve done a few websites over the years, but I’m a novice when it comes to WordPress. And my attempts to play with the code to customize the theme I’d chosen had clearly caused some kind of conflict with the way the theme was constructed in css or javascript or whatever builder software had been used to program it. (Is goat sacrifice a viable programming technique? Asking for a friend).
Regardless, the more I worked on trying to fix it, the more I felt like my inner Beaker was showing. (see above) Now in all fairness on any given day, I should probably identify as being on a spectrum somewhere between a Muppet and a mad scientist/tinkerer. I’ve been told that Rocket is clearly my avatar in the MCU, at least, and on my more Rocket days, you could argue it’s both. Last week was the week of Beaker though. (Again see above)
I soon figured out that I just needed to either find a different theme or re-learn everything I’d ever known about HTML, CSS, PHP, JavaScript, and really immerse myself in learning code to expand on that knowledge base and create a new theme from the ground up. The possibilities that would grant are endless, right? After a lot of going back and forth, and realizing I still had a pesky full time day job that required me to pay attention to them once in a while, in addition to wanting to spend time with my very loving and very supportive fiancee, I eventually chose door number one. And that was obviously the correct choice.
In the end, is the site’s design everything I want at this point? No, the theme and layout aren’t perfect, but this is far better than what I’d originally chosen, and it has the benefit of not making me start from scratch. Novel idea I know. But now that I have all of this chaos out of it the way, I can turn my attention to building JARVIS. We’ll talk about that next time (no really — for real this time).
Until then, get out there and build the world you want!
