Downtime

Personal
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Oops

Apologies for the recent downtime. It was the result of a Hexo upgrade gone wrong for some reason. Unfortunately, I do not know why it happened, but whatever the problem was it does not manifest itself on Netlify. Presumably it was some configuration setting present on my old hosting account, but rather than spending time trying to figure out what it was, I opted to move forward with my move to Netlify.

What Happened

As part of my blog upgrade, I wanted to update my blog theme with something more modern looking. I ended up choosing the Cactus Dark theme, and migrated my blog to a newer version of Hexo and implemented the new theme. When I was finished, everything was working fine on my local machine and since Hexo output is a collection of static pages I figured it would be fine and uploaded the new site to my hosting provider.

For some reason, either part of the CSS or some bit of JavaScript was not being served properly, and so the pages were being rendered without any styling. After a brief attempt at trying to debug the problem, I tried deploying the site to Netlify and discovered that it was rendering properly when served their system. At this point I decided to move forward with the migration instead of continuing to mess around with the old site. Unfortunately, it took more time than I would have liked to transfer my domain name over and get DNS configured to work properly with Netlify.

As part of this migration, I removed the plugin that generated the JSON feed. The original author has seemingly abandoned the project, and the output is no longer compliant with the JSON feed specification.

Next Steps

So far, I am very happy with Netlify and the continuous delivery process the use to publish changes. This removes all of the friction I used to experience when publishing updates to my own blog. This should encourage me to post more often, hopefully. My old site had a redirect rule to route requests to the old RSS feed to the new ATOM feed. I need to figure out how to do the same now with Netlify.

Thanks for reading.