This should be a relatively short blog post, although of course I say that without yet having written it (or rather while in the process of writing the first sentence of it), and given my tendency to digress and ramble on in these posts I cannot deny the possibility that it will end up being much longer than I anticipate for no good reason at all. Anyway, though, although this is likely something that nobody cares about but me, I wanted to announce that something that I'd intended to do over a year ago has finally been done: I have migrated the Wongery to its new hosting plan.

I say "new" hosting plan, but in fact I purchased this hosting plan, with the intent of moving the Wongery there, way back in December 2023, before the (much heralded but ultimately fairly meaningless) "hard launch". I didn't move it immediately because the hosting company said they would perform the migration for me, but they bungled that completely, so I resolved to do it on my own. And as for why I didn't do it earlier, well, uh...

Okay, the obvious elephant-in-the-room reason why I didn't complete the migration earlier was simple procrastination. But truthfully there were other things I wanted to get done first, although there's absolutely no good reason those other things should have taken me a year. For one, I wanted to migrate a different domain first to make sure I could do it right; if and only if I managed to migrate this domain to the new server without breaking anything, then, and only then, I would try migrating the Wongery.

Well, eventually I did get around to trying the migration of that other domain. And by "eventually" I mean... I set up the domain on the new hosting plan in late August, but didn't migrate the files till late December. (Once again, I have no good explanation for why it took me so long, aside from procrastination.) This involved dealing with private nameservers and DNS glue and a bunch of other things I had no previous experience with, but in the end it went relatively smoothly. The domain was migrated, and everything seemed to be in order.

So why didn't I then go ahead and migrate the Wongery right then? Well, this time I actually had a good reason for not doing so beyond procrastination. As I mentioned, I had purchased the new hosting plan in December 2023. And that means that in December 2024 it was due for renewal. And... I didn't have the money to renew it. The industry I work in takes a break for the holidays, so money is always tight then, and I'd just had to spend a significant amount on car repairs, so I was especially skint at the moment. I did request and receive a two-week extension on the payment due date, and I figured I should be able to make the payment by then, especially once work picked up in January, but I was still leery of migrating the Wongery just then, in case I wasn't able to make the payment and the hosting plan was suspended, which would mean any sites hosted there would go down. (Would it really matter if the Wongery went down for a while just now, since nobody is visiting it anyway? Well... no, not really, I guess, but I still didn't want it to happen.)

As it turned it, I made the right call. Because of certain local events I won't go into here (mostly in the interest of once again not giving away where I live), work did not in fact pick up right away in January, and I was not able to make the payment by the extended due date. I did get another one-week extension, but it wasn't enough. The hosting plan was suspended.

So, anyway, as of a few days ago I still didn't have the money to pay for the hosting plan without risking falling behind on other important bills... but it was at the point that I had to make the payment then or risk having the hosting account deleted entirely. So I went ahead and made the payment and, uh, well, the next couple weeks may be difficult. But the plan is back up, so I figured it was about time to go ahead and finally migrate the Wongery to its new virtual home.

Now, I think one of the reasons that I had been putting this off for so long—aside from, of course, simply my lamentable general tendency toward procrastination—was that I know little to nothing about network administration and didn't really know what I was doing, and it seemed almost inevitable that when I tried to migrate the Wongery to a new hosting plan, something would go seriously wrong and break the site, something that it would likely take me several days at least to resolve. Astonishingly, this did not happen; I performed the migration and everything seemed to be working right away. So either I'm not quite as incompetent as I thought, or, much more likely, I got really lucky. (Of course, I haven't tried using all the site's features yet, so it remains entirely possible that something is broken in a way that isn't immediately obvious.) So... hooray, the site is (apparently) working at its new virtual location, and... well, it would be blatantly false to say that all is right with the world, given everything that's going on at the moment, but at least one very minor thing is right that could very easily not have been.

Now, this also paves the way for other work to get done on the Wongery. I've been saying I wanted to, among many other things, finally get the statblocks for the RPG space working, which involves... well, kind of a lot of steps, but among them is writing a new extension. And I was a bit reluctant to mess with relatively low-level aspects of the Wongery before the migration was complete, because it could involve duplicating some work. After all, I'd want to do this on a local version of the site, and I'd want to have that local version as up-to-date as possible, and to migrate the site I'd have to download the most recent versions of all the files and databases, so that would be the best time to update my local version of the site as well, so I may as well wait until then to work on more extensions. Now, was this in reality just an excuse to try to justify my procrastination? Very possibly! But at least now I have one fewer excuse.

Of course, getting the site working correctly locally was a whole separate issue from getting it working on the new server, and one that ended up running into some obstacles of its own. (Yes, I had a (mostly) working local copy before, but it was outdated enough I decided to pretty much rebuild the local copy of the site from scratch.) But it's there now, and up, and seems to be more or less functional, although, as with the production version of the site on its new server, I haven't tested all of its functionality yet.

So. Anyway. Long, long after I said I was going to do it, the Wongery's migration to its new hosting service has finally been completed. That's one item off my to-do list; several thousand to go. But at least maybe with that finally out of the way I can move on and prioritize some of my other plans...