WordPress has been nagging me for some time that I needed to update the version of PHP this blog is running on and, in particular, Jetpack had finally given up on me. The sticking point has been that the Digital Ocean droplet it’s running on has been stuck back on Trusty Tahr and a previous attempt to upgrade it had gone awry.
I finally took the plunge and set up a new droplet running Bionic Beaver and eventually found the right combination of PHP modules to get everything running again. Whilst I was at it, I ticked another item off my todo list and enabled TLS (trivial with the aid of Certbot and Let’s Encrypt). A late evening but nothing too painful.
On the downside, when I first set the blog up (back in 2005) I used Gallery to manage images. The WordPress plugin died a while back but the Gallery install itself failed to play nicely with the new PHP version. As a consequence, the item to write a script to locate all those <wpg2id> tags and replace them with the appropriate images still remains very much on my todo list. Oh, and then there’s all those GPX files that were being displayed with Google Maps…