Tong Family

Well, I’m nearly through my journey, the new Digital Ocean site is working well. It is sad I couldn’t upgrade the old one, but that’s the price of bare metal.

The site I’m giving up on is Cloudways. I finally navigated through most of the problems, but the one that finally was the last straw was how they handle domain names and SSL certificates. In explicable, this is the Applications section, you can say what domains you want, but Safari keeps showing a certificate with an old domain in it.

I’m not sure why. Also maybe for the same reason, the really great “Auto Post to another site” wasn’t working, although it works with both the busted DigitalOcean Ubuntu 20.04 version and the newere Ubuntu 22.04.

Where to from here: Dual WordPress plus Upgrade and Snapshots

The basic plan now is to end up with a $12/month InMotion plan and it looks like a $12/month DigitalOcean plan. We will see if the DigitalOcean has enough memory as its only 2GB:

1. I’m going to delete the old Ubuntu 20.04 site next month. this will leave me with the Inmotion Hosting where tongfamily.com and richtong.net live and also richtong.org will live the new cross posted site.
2. Since I’m taking regular backups having a hot standby and a backup set seems good enough. I’ll also start regular snapshots

Long term plan move to Hugo

I’m working plan is to move all this to Hugo eventually since although the site has 6,000 posts, they are mainly static and archival, so that plan is:

1. Figure out how to do a WordPress export to Hugo. The main problem is the Tool > Export times out because it is running a long time. I’m thinking now I should install wp-cli on the DigitalOcean machine then do this export manually.
2. Once that is done, use a WordPress to Hugo tool and see if can deal with the images. I’m currenlty using Cloudinary on WordPress because disk is expensive and slow, but I’m thinking that with Hugo, given the current GitHub limits, if I move the big Videos to YouTube unlisted or Google Drive then I will be in the small file limit of GitHub. Then I can host the whole thing for free with Netlify

The tricky details to work out are:

1. Are the images correctly loaded
2. I have a bunch of podcasts and things that I cross discuss, so that will need some editing
3. Most of the widgets on the page are going away, but that’s not a big deal
4. I moved the comments to disqus a while ago, so I need to see how to add that back or just port the 10 comments somewhere else.
5. One things that I’ve been doing is putting pretty images into the posts to add interest by a copy from Pexel. This is more of a pain given that there is not an integrated client for doing the search, so more download and copy into GitHub is required. But that’s a small price to pay for zero maintenance
6. If I do this this will give me the time to go through 29 years worth of posts and find the old images on Wayback machine

Anyway if this works then in the end, I might end up with a legacy WordPress site and most of my posting being done with Hugo on GitHub either using Decap CMS or using just the GitHub mobile or desktop clients.