…And we’re back! it’s been a minute hey? So it turns out that when update systems tell you to backup before proceeding, you should do that.
Back in January of this year, I was doing some pretty regular maintenance on this site - I updated wordpress to the latest version, and then I went to update my droplet to patch some things related to open CVEs - the kind of thing I’ve done a hundred times before. But I was pressed for time, and I clearly did something wrong, and I bricked my server. Could not get it to restart. I spent a bit of time in the recovery console to no avail. But I was in a rush, and busy, and then… time passed, frustration grew, etc
However, something else happened: Claude Sonnet 4.5 was released, and unlike literally every support-desk person, web-search and previous AI model - it gave some suggestions that turned out to work: I managed to get enough functionality in the recovery console that I could attach an external volume, shovel some partial backups, and then it wrote some crazy scripts to cobble together (most) of my old site.
So here we are, live on the web again and it feels good! No more Wordpress - I’m now running an Astro site, on Cloudflare Pages. All static, no database to corrupt, no server to brick, etc. So let’s hope this lends itself to me writing more again!