Finally

The conversion of the live site for my friend is finally done. Right now the site is working with the latest stable release of the software for it, and it includes all of the earlier custom software as well as the styling changes. What a pain that was to finally get it going. The final conversion took only a bit under an hour. The reason it took that long is in the middle of it I got a bit distracted and forgot a step along the way. I had overlooked the consequences of one of the conversion steps and for ten minutes or so the state of the server puzzled me. It was not acting as I had expected it should and the cause of that baffled me. Remembering a custom configuration parameter that I had set manually earlier in the week, I checked if the normal administration interface had overwritten it when I temporarily disabled the domain to do the conversion. Sure enough, that's exactly what it was. Plesk does not like it when you modify the Apache configuration files yourself.

All in all this process has taught me a few things about problem solving and how to mitigate risk. Unfortunately it also taught me that conversions are very very lengthy if there are only a couple of hours everyday to work on them.

What is left before I can begin development of my hobby site ? Well there is that whole upgrading of the base operating system on the server. The procedure is well documented by the hosting company but it is still fraught with danger. I have to think this one through, and perform it carefully. Of course I'll have to have a viable backup strategy, so that I dont loose any data.

Overall I'm happy with the results, I only wish I had managed to get them done a month earlier. That is in the past now. Time to move on.