What happened to this site for the last several years?

I know I am known for my sarcasm and attempts at being humorous, but I am completely serious about this story.

The last time I went SCUBA diving was with TwinDuct in June of 2022; I took pictures, made a draft of my my blog post and had the attitude that I will finalize and publish when I have time.

Dealing with the financial ramifications of the tail end of COVID and a bad business venture that I was dumb enough to get involved with, I had other things on my mind.

In September of 2022, the Data Center where my website was hosted caught on fire and my site was down for weeks.

It was explained to me that I just have a “fun personal blog” and that getting my site back online was last priority since there are customers that have no revenue coming in from their sites.

Sometime in October of 2022, my site came back online, restored from backups my hosting provider had.

Over the course of the next several months, my site crashed and went off line many times.

Around March of 2023, I was notified by my hosting service that there wasn’t any money in hosting websites for them and I needed to find another hosting service.

Moving websites is a pain in the ass, so I asked them, “How much would it cost to stay?”

They responded, “We are not going to host anymore websites. Make a backup copy of your site and find another hosting service.”

I had made a backup copy when my website reappeared after the fire and since I had made no updates for quite along time, the backup was good.

I made two more backups, just in case.

I found another hosting service, transferred my domain name and all the files.

The database for this site is over two gigabytes and I needed support to import the database files.

Then I found out that my award winning theme and PHP files that make up this site weren’t compatible with the newer version of PHP nor the database.

Well, I had a lot of other things going on in my life, so I will get to it when I get to it.

For the next few years, my site displayed “500 Internal Server Error.”

Having some recent reminicent thoughts of everything that I have done in the past, probably due to another mid-life crisis, I realized that I truly missed SCUBA diving, river rafting, all the other travels and macho activities and especially the friends that I met along the way.

I realized that over twenty years of my life was documented on my website and last week I was determined to fix the issues.

The control panel on my hosting service said I was running PHP 7; I found out that it is actually PHP 8.

I upgraded the blog files to a compatible release and used A.I. to update my theme.

Once I uploaded the new files and ran the update script, there it was!

My site is back!

And surprisingly, everything appears to be there!

If I wasn’t so macho, I would have cried.

All my diving adventures, all the debriefings and friends that I met are back online.

It means a lot to me, but I realize, it probably doesn’t mean much to anyone else.

Looking through my website, I realized how out of date it is in just a few years and I’m not talking about the format, which is timeless.

Half the blogs and businesses that I linked to were dead.

I also realized that I missed a lot of events and at least one tragic death of a SCUBA friend.

My tanks are out of hydro and my gear needs to be serviced.

So, until I get that rectified, I will be doing some free diving; I hope.

On another note, I have also been living in Mexico on and off for the last two years.

That story will have to wait for another time.

Until the next time, thank you!

PSD

February’s weather was mostly crappy, but it looked like it was getting better this morning.

However, for various reasons I was not able to dive.

I’m hoping to get back in the water this Friday or Saturday.

On another note, I have been going through my vast collection of VHS tapes and digitizing the best.

I found an old SoCal Connected episode that features the Ocean Defenders Alliance.

SoCal Connected – Ocean Defenders (Circa 2010)

As important as the Ocean Defender’s work is, it is interesting to note that the producers of this episode are obviously not SCUBA divers.

In one part the narrator says something like, “The dive is so deep that the tanks are filled with a special mixture of Oxygen and Nitrogen.”

And of course, for dramatic effect, Don has never been this deep before and is a bit nervous.

This was an interesting retro-find.