Limping Back to Life

by Posted on

Unfortunately, the sissons.ca website has been neglected for several years. I let it go off the air in 2017 after getting busy with other things. By the time I decided to resurrect my personal site in 2021, I had moved to a new hosting company. All I had left from the original site from was a MySQL Dump file on an external USB drive (courtesy of the brilliant PHPMyAdmin tool) and a zipped copy of the WordPress “uploads” directory. Everything else was long gone.

I abandoned http:/sissons.ca because I was spending time on two other sites that I manage:

I maintain a few other small business websites in addition to my day job at StoryTek for clients and friends including http://tumbletot.com and http://collingwoodpools.com.

Re-constructing the http://sissons.ca website was a bit of a chore. I needed to load an old database into a fresh WordPress instance at least 10 versions newer without a record of required plug-ins or their versions. Articles needed to be re-inserted via raw SQL “insert” statements. Given the level of effort, I didn’t bother restoring every article. The article about Falcona Camp was my main reason for wanting to restore the website since sites referencing Falcona camp seem to be sadly disappearing.

I managed to get the site working although I’m sure that the database remains badly broken! I’m sure I’ll continue to encounter issues whenever I tweak a plug-in or apply a software update.

Anyway – it’s good to be back on the air!

Published by Gord