Part of my original plan for this vacation week was to import some old original content I’d made for Tumblr years ago, specifically the text post meme and gifset stuff. Only to find… I’d already imported those things years ago. Like, the text post meme archive is a Gallery entry now, and I made a string of posts out of the James Burke gifsets. (Here’s the first archival entry.)

Way to go, Past!Me. Nicely done, have yourself a cup of cocoa as a reward.

Looking at those old James Burke posts specifically, though, I noticed a lot of weird character-encoding issues. I honestly don’t know what happened there, though I’m willing to bet “migrating from webserver to webserver over the course of decades” is involved somehow. At any rate, in the interests of making this site a bit less janky for folks who go trawling in the archives (yeah, that’s likely) I spent some time weeding out most of those stray UTF8 artifacts with some judicious search-and-replace in the database.

And people say I don’t know how to have fun.

Sophos’ excellent Naked Security blog posted an advisory about a vulnerability in PHP, the code engine that basically drives WordPress sites like this one (among other things), so this morning I decided to update.

And then I decided to upgrade.

See, we’ve been running on PHP 7.4 since the latest server migration. That’s two major releases back from the current, as PHP 8.1 came out late last year. In due time, nobody was going to be checking for security problems in that version anymore so I figured it’s better to upgrade now rather than find out that I should have after something’s gone horribly wrong.

Of course a version bump always includes the chance that some older piece of code won’t work right, and sure enough several of the sites I host fell down after the change.

Quacked Panes fell down because there was still a set of squiggly brackets instead of the now-required square brackets in a part of the Webcomic plugin. (If you’re curious: Line 426 of webcomic/lib/transcribe/filters.php in the plugins directory. It’s a five-second fix of a short, simple line of code.)

My son’s website fell down because of a YouTube plugin that hadn’t been updated in seven entire years. I simply removed that plugin directory from the WordPress file structure and huzzah, the site loads again.

Both of our PmWiki sites fell down because, well, they were a bit out of date and that’s on me. A quick unpack of the latest installation files into the website directories solved that in a hurry.

My Foundry VTT server wasn’t affected because it doesn’t use any PHP. On the downside, every server reboot results in my having to manually launch the silly thing, which… isn’t the worst situation, it’s just annoying. pm2 save, my ass.

While I was goofing around in the server anyway, I also updated some backup settings (can’t ever go wrong making sure that your backups are good!) and performed some general tidying-up. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday morning… other than the moments of panic when I realized how many websites had fallen down, of course…

Considering that the Linode VPS known as “node2” started out several years ago as an Ubuntu 14.04 LTS system (the “14” part indicating it was built five or six years ago now) and I upgraded that in-place to 16.04 (which mostly taught me to never again do an in-place Ubuntu LTS upgrade) and seeing as how 20.04 is available now… I decided it’s time for “node3” to take over.

Yesterday I built node3 with the same “hardware” specs as node2, performed the necessary steps to make it a LAMP rig, and migrated over two of the non-database-driven websites (the PmWiki sites in the frell.co domain) successfully. Then I set up backups, because you always prioritize backups, y’all.

Today I migrated one of the WordPress sites (the mostly-defunct myduckonstuff.com) without notable drama, which is certainly encouraging.

My goal is to have this all done by month-end so I can turn off node2 and not pay full rate for both servers. Wish me luck…

For the record: This week I got rid of the Piwigo gallery in favor of just cramming galleries into the main site via plugin. Note the “Galleries” menu above. In case any Piwigo fans/devs read this? Vanity-searching your project name on Twitter just to tell a random person how wrong they are about the problems with your product is a great way to ensure that the random person in question will immediately dump your product. Just an eff why eye!

Also, I updated the My Sites linkage on the sidebar to reflect my gradual migration over to federated services (Mastodon and PixelFed instead of Twitter and Instagram).

The Blogroll (wow, what an ancient term) went away in favor of a shorter list of friends and other sites I want linked.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled weekend shenanigans.

This site started nearly 15 years ago on the Monaural Jerk (“Journal maker” anagrammed) platform and was migrated to WordPress some time later. I ran the first rendition of what was then just called Gallery, then the Gallery 2, and didn’t quite make it to Gallery 3 before they pulled the plug on the entire project so in came Piwigo. Also, over 15 years I have linked to a great many odd sites.

The term you’re now looking for is “link rot.” As part of the revitalization project I installed a link checker plugin and boy oh boy did it find some broken links. And by “some” I mean “over 700.” I have spent the last couple days’ worth of free time wrangling that quantity down to “merely 521.” At this point I’m probably going to focus on the couple hundred gallery-related fixes and write off all of the old links to sites that probably don’t exist anymore. If the link is 404‘d after all these years, there’s not much value in chasing down whether or not it’s supposed to go anywhere valid today, right? Right.

Don’t worry: I’ll tell you about the Thing I’m Doing, soon. All in due time.