The chickens have come home to roost.

After not upgrading the Protozoic server for roughly five years, running an end of life version of WordPress because I couldn’t upgrade PHP, I finally had to pay the piper. Protozoic has been running WordPress since 2004, and all (well most) of the posts are stored in the database as Markdown. I chose this setup when WordPress was only about a year old and Markdown was only months old. Sounds like I had great foresight, no?

No, I did not. Apparently the Markdown plugin I’ve been using for WordPress was retired back in 2013. It took me some casting about to find a setup that worked with the way we write posts, and the way most of the posts are stored in the database. Much of our media is stored in directories, since I think they predate the WordPress Media Library. I have made an attempt to bring all that media into the library to ease future migrations at the cost of my whole Sunday.

Even our poor theme has suffered. Apparently the widgets at the bottom of the page were legacy widgets – those too have now been upgraded.

There’s a lot of link rot in those old posts and I know we are less active, but here’s to another five years. Let me know if you find any issues that I missed in the transition.