Well ... that was fun

So … I’ve had this blog since 2005. I installed it from original sources. And WP made upgrades in the 2.x time frame, quite painless.

Or so it seemed.

Slowly, over time, some configuration/settings/whatever got out of whack. And with the last update, from a system originally installed in final form in 2013 or so, something broke.

I am not sure what. But the symptoms were simple … new posts would replace the most recent posts. Deleting them did not help. Moving the DB did not help. No log spam about the errors either. And it’s PHP. You don’t want to be debugging it.

It behaved as if a cache was not being invalidated at a higher level, and that post numbers were not incrementing at a lower level.

So I looked at alternatives. The ghost folks work very hard to tell you not to run your own. And most of the other non-hosted solutions are … well … meh.

I expanded my search to include static site generators, and started looking at exporting from WP to Hugo or similar. Lo and behold, during that search, I came across the export/import bit. So I tried it.

And this is where we are at. On a fresh new VM, with a fresh new OS, and WP and php7 and …

This really wasn’t fun.