Man, 2018, that was the year my whole personal website just tanked. Not gracefully, either. It literally just stopped serving pages. I woke up one morning to a screen full of database connection errors and a lot of very scary red text, and I knew I was in deep trouble.
I had been running that thing for maybe ten years on some cheap shared host. It was one of those old-school CMS setups, you know? A complete Frankenstein of outdated PHP modules and random plugins I had installed over the years without ever really bothering to update them. I had the classic attitude: “If it ain’t broke, don’t touch it.” Huge mistake. It was broken—I just hadn’t seen the cracks yet, and they finally widened into a canyon.
The Big Dig and the Dust Bunnies
My first move was, naturally, to panic for about an hour. Then I remembered I had a backup. Somewhere. I dug through three old external drives sitting on a shelf next to the router before I found the right one. It was labeled in Sharpie, just “Blog Backup 2017 Pre-Update.” Close enough, I thought. I was feeling pretty proud of my past self for that moment of foresight.
Opening that file was an immediate nightmare. It wasn’t just a simple folder of website files. It was one massive, monolithic SQL dump file and a few huge XML blobs for the uploaded media. Trying to import that into a fresh install of the old CMS was completely useless. The versions were totally mismatched, the ancient database schema wasn’t compatible, and it choked on the character encoding straight away. Just pure garbage output.
I ended up spending the better part of three whole days just trying to get the content back out. Forget setting up the actual site again; I just wanted the words back, the hundreds of posts I’d written over a decade. I tried a Python script I found on GitHub, one that was supposedly designed to convert this specific database version to plain text and Markdown. It ran for almost seven hours straight, pegging my laptop CPU at 100%, and then spit out a folder full of files named things like post_001_title_*. Every single line break was wrong, all the internal links were broken, and every image reference was pointing to a local path that didn’t exist. It was worse than useless—it was actively destructive to my will to live.
- First attempt: Reinstall the old CMS and import the SQL. Failed hard due to version conflict.
- Second attempt: Use the magical GitHub Python scraper. Failed miserably; the output was unusable trash.
- Third attempt: Suck it up and use a simple text editor.
The Manual Labor Grind and the Pivot
That third option? Yep, that’s where I ended up. I gave up on automation. I opened the giant SQL file in a simple text editor, searching through the messy, bracketed code for the specific text marker that indicated the beginning of a post body. I then manually pulled out the text, paragraph by paragraph. It was slow. Painfully slow. I’d copy the text chunk, paste it into a fresh Markdown file, re-add the titles and dates I had to find in the messy metadata, and manually fix all the formatting like the bold text and the bullet lists. I felt like a medieval scribe laboring by candlelight, only my light was the flickering screen and my quill was a sticky spacebar.
I decided right there and then that I was permanently done with complicated, dynamic setups. No more databases. No more server-side scripting that could blow up because I forgot to change a number. I made the firm decision to move everything to a static site generator. I picked one that was super simple to build and deploy, just basically a pile of HTML files. I figured if the server crashes again, I’d just drag and drop the files back to the hosting provider. Simple and robust.
The whole manual migration—the copying, pasting, formatting, and then setting up the new build system—took me roughly two weeks of evenings after the kids were in bed. I was sitting there every night with a giant mug of coffee, going through post after post, cursing my younger self for never sticking to a consistent tagging or image naming system. I kept thinking, “Why am I doing this? Is this effort worth it?”
The Real Push
The real reason I went this far, pushing through the SQL mess and the tedious manual cleanup? It wasn’t about the traffic, or the “deep dive” into anything complicated, believe me. It was because my youngest kid needed some advice for a presentation they were making for their history class. Years ago, I had written a slightly goofy guide about building a super cheap, custom-configured server out of old parts, and they remembered it and thought it was perfect.
I went to the URL, fully expecting to show off my helpful archived work and give them a quick lesson. Instead, all I got was that glorious, soul-crushing “Error 500: Internal Server Error.” I couldn’t even explain to my own kid why my own site, with my own writing, was broken. It felt completely ridiculous. The guide was still technically there, locked behind a server I couldn’t easily fix without pouring an entire weekend into troubleshooting the PHP version.
That was the final tipping point. I didn’t want my own work to be inaccessible, just because I was scared of doing an update or because some core module decided to quit. So I pushed through. I finished the static generator setup, figured out how the deployment worked using some basic command line scripts, and finally pushed it all live.
It’s up now. It’s certainly faster. It’s not perfect—some of the old images are still broken links, and the theme is a little plain, but I don’t care. It’s stable. It’s static. When people ask why I went with such a simple, almost ancient-looking setup on the new build, I just tell them I learned my lesson the hard way: the less moving parts you include, the less stuff that can possibly break when you’re busy living life and not looking at the logs.
