Hello all. In my last post I mentioned that our web servers were going to be upgraded, and that the upgrade process may take a few days. Well, a few days ended up being a few weeks. It’s a long story. Here’s the short version.
Our web server service was bought out by a much larger company. We (incorrectly) assumed the new company would simply migrate our data to their new servers and away we go. That didn’t happen. The new company emailed us to let us know that not only did we have to do our own data migration, we also had about a week to do it before the old servers would be shut down and all data lost. Yeow! Lesson learned: always keep a local backup of all of your offsite web documents. [1]
Fortunately I had a contact at a local web server service. They agreed to pull everything they could off the old servers and migrate this data to their local servers. The data transfer was the easy part. Setting up the various files and folders that make up our BLT WordPress blog site was the hard and arduous part. It took a long time. We also had to move our domain names (more on this in a moment).
I am happy to report that BLT still lives! But the work is not over. This migration process has made it clear that the BLT blog site (and some of our other web resources) needs some updating. As an example, the BLT blog site is not what they call “responsive.” A responsive web site will detect the device that is being used—computer, tablet, or smartphone—and reformat the content to fit that device. So, even though the migration has been completed, we will enter into phase two or the process of updating our web resources. I’m hoping this will only take another couple of weeks, but I cannot say for sure. In the mean time, I invite you to read an article that I published over at Linked In entitled Making the Mysteries of Secret Societies a Little Less Mysterious.
Thanks for hanging in there as we go through this early Spring cleaning process. Honestly, this process was long overdue. We started with our old web server service in 2003! We are getting rid of or otherwise consolidating a number of web services. As a result, we will definitely reduce our technological footprint. If all goes well, we’ll see you on the other side of this process with a whole new look and web services that are more responsive. Oh yeah … almost forgot. Because we moved our domain names, the new address for the BLT blog site will be as follows (sans quotes):
“https://www.bltblog.fhlfoundation.org”
— Rick
Notes:
[1] There are backup utility programs that will backup your entire WordPress blog site to your local hard drive. One such utility is Backup Buddy. We plan to begin using such a backup utility.
