Those who arrived here via Mastodon are probably already on board with the situation, but for anyone else, you might notice that things are looking a little sparse here at Chez Scopique.

See, I self-host on an aging HP desktop server. When I originally set this thing up, it was already wheezing towards Paradise; that I had to scavenge hard drives from the plastic bin of them that I keep in a closet wasn’t going to give the server the punch it needed, either. Self hosting this site was not the original intention. I had set it up so I could have a place to store my screenshots and projects and such. Once I got involved with the Fediverse, though, I got it in my head that maybe self-hosting was a good idea, so I set up WordPress on the server and got everything up and running.

I was already living on borrowed time, though, and today was The Day The Boot Drive Died because of course it was: I had accidentally shut down the power breaker to the server while trying to troubleshoot why my basement heater wasn’t working and when the server wouldn’t boot, it was just par for the course.

The good news is that I had another drive sitting right there on top of the server for some reason. The server itself allows for easy drive removal, so I popped out the boot drive, swapped it for the other drive, and now had the opportunity to start anew. The server had originally been built on Ubuntu Desktop, but this time I picked up Ubuntu Server. Thankfully, all of my other drives are working just fine, knock on wood, and I was able to mount them and share them with my desktop system here (hello!) so things are moving in the Right Direction.

Except for this site. Being a complete dumbass, I had somewhat recently backed up all of the perishable content from the server to a removable drive, because I knew the server would die some day, and probably some day soon. But this site is running in a Docker container, as is the database, and I hadn’t organized any way to back up the contents of the site. I actually do have all of the images from all of the posts, but the posts themselves, locked away in the database in a Docker container which no longer exists, were lost. I also lost all of my categories and tags, too. I did find a backup XML file from 2019, but when I tried to import those posts everything went to hell so I deleted the Docker containers and volumes and started over.

You may notice that this is a different look to the site as well. My original theme, BFastMag Pro, had been intended to organize my…diverse project interests. This time around, though, I realized that no one comes to this site through the front door. Damned near everyone slides in through a side window via links posted to Mastodon or wherever else I might post it. I didn’t need the frills that BFastMag provided on the homepage, so I am auditioning some new themes. I could suck it up and finally learn PHP and the inner-workings of WordPress and roll my own but that’s too much like work, and I have enough of that coming at me from other sources.

Tabula rasa, my friends. I am hoping that maybe this is a Sign to get my blogging act together and write better, more meaningful, more interesting posts, but time will tell.