This is the first post written on my new blog server!

Migrating my blog to a new server was one of my goals for 2019 – one that I underestimated! The main motivation was that I could not upgrade to the latest version of the WordPress platform on my old server – due to some permissions issues (probably related to how I had set it up originally). My old server was also using the AWS custom Linux operating system, which was fine, but is only available on AWS instances, meaning I could not replicate it in Virtual Box on my Mac. As I am more familiar with the Ubuntu Linux operating system, which I can work with locally (and have even made an automated script to deploy a virtual machine) I wanted to use that on the new server.

Over the last few weeks I have done a lot of testing on my Mac, making sure I could install everything correctly and migrate my data across seamlessly. I span up a new server on EC2, installed WordPress with the plan being I would simply point my web address at the new server, restore an UpdraftPlus backup and be running with minimal downtime. However, I forgot that WordPress does not play nicely with having its address changed and I ended up with a bit more downtime than anticipated whilst I fixed that issue. I also had a problem with the Jetpack plugin, which I was unable to test on my Mac, but I was able to fix that fairly quickly.

Hopefully I have squashed all the bugs and the only noticeable change to the blog will be that my theme now plays nicely with smaller screen, so if you are viewing my blog on a mobile device you will see my black theme, rather than the standard Jetpack mobile view. I will now be able to concentrate on my 2020 goals for my blog: building a new theme and improving the way series of posts (such as my Parental Leave II blogs) are displayed, which I have already been working on – so keep your eyes peeled…