After a short 101 days of downtime, postneo.com is back. Sorry about that.
The very ancient VPS that the site was on died one day and never came back. I figured that it would be a huge pain to bring it back online but it actually went pretty quickly.
I brought up a new box at DigitalOcean since I had been meaning to try them out. It’s still early but I’m definitely impressed. I ended up moving all of my small utility box stuff off of Cloud Servers and on to this new box as well.
The first thing to do was to bring back the old blog back up on the new box with a new web stack (Nginx instead of Lighttpd) with nothing but a MySQL dump and my web content. Once the database was loaded, content put in place, and configuration updated I was good to go. Aside from the fact that it pretty much just worked in its new home, the thing that blew my mind about WordPress was that the upgrade from 3.1.2 circa 2011 to 3.8 was about as quick and simple as it gets. I followed the instructions and was on the latest release in literally 10 minutes.
There’s definitely a lesson to be learned there in how to delight and amaze your users as we write our software. I was delighted and amazed as a user and humbled as a software developer by this collection of PHP files that “just worked.”