Well, I haven’t written anything on my blog since late 2016, well, that was just a video share from someone else, so last I actually wrote something was late 2015! You might say that I didn’t write because I’m bad at writing but that’s not what prevented me from writing all these years.
Why did I suddenly stop writing?
This goes back to my early web design days. You might know that I’ve first started with Joomla (after the basic HTML and stuff) back in 2014, but in 2015, I switched to WordPress. That is why I stopped renewing the premium Joomla theme I was using back then. So, the Joomla installation on my pavakpaul.in was not being upgraded, at all. The blog was running fine though, no issues. Then, a major problem appeared. See, the website was running on Joomla 2.5, which supports PHP 5. It was fine as the website was hosted in a Ubuntu 14.04 VPS, which had PHP 5 by default in their repository. But the problem started when I tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 16.04 which was offering PHP 7 by default. Since Joomla 2.5 didn’t support PHP 7 at all, I had to upgrade it to version 3. But as I’ve discussed earlier, I didn’t renew the premium template’s license as I’ve switched to WordPress for my website designs. So I couldn’t upgrade the template and upgrading Joomla was a catastrophe. The backend was somewhat broken, the frontend was half broke. No extensions were working. Somehow reinstalling the extensions fixed the problems regarding the extensions features but the many core functionalities weren’t working such as the contact form and tags. And for the final nail in the coffin, the backend stopped working completely a few months ago! That is when I knew that I had to move this website to WordPress.
The Joomla to WordPress migration
I decided to do a different blog site for my blogs. Because as I’ve mentioned, I switched to WordPress from Joomla. Who knows if I won’t change the platform again! Anyway, I’d design a new blog site but I didn’t want to re-write the articles. Now, I’m not a MySQL expert that I’d import the posts manually from the database. So I researched and found a plugin, FG Joomla to WordPress. This plugin has helped me to convert all the Joomla pages and articles to WordPress posts. I did have to fix some of the images as I had a habit of keeping images to external URLs. But long story short, the migration is a success!
Why did I suddenly decided to start writing?
Well, I do a lot of content planning and blog publishing for a client and that has inspired me to start writing again. Also, sometimes I find a topic and want to write, but as I said, the platform was down so I couldn’t really write.
What is the future of this blog
Well, I don’t get enough time to write. Also, when I’m free, I’m often too tired to write. So I wouldn’t be able to write very frequently. I also have no plans for paid posts or reviews so I’ll write when I have time and I feel like writing.
I did have problems because of the platform switch, not updating the hosting and Joomla and so on. But right now these wouldn’t be a problem as it’s hosted on one of my Incodin servers, which I maintain professionally. So rest assured, the blog is not going anywhere.
Thank you for reading.
