The internet is truly an awful place in 2026. The enshittification of everything continues, arguably right down to the enshittification of thinking. I’m not going to link directly to The Nation and their terrible site. If only there were a word to describe what happened to thenation.com… You can instead get there from Bluesky, which is itself a product of the wreckage that was Twitter. ugh.
How is any of this relevant and why am I writing about this? I was recently listening to the new Radavist Podcast interview with John Watson (of The Radavist) and it got me thinking about this site, crossgeared.com. I liked the serendipity of discovering blogs and sites scattered around and I’ve decided move back and participate in that version of the internet. So, crossgeared.com back from its 13 year break. After a couple hours of updates, debugging and fixes it appears that the site is mostly running and ready to be rediscovered by potentially dozens of people.
What have I done?
- Backup everything
- Move the site to a new directory (I’ve been with the same host for over 20(!) years)
- Fix a handful of SSL issues with Cloudflare, the host, and within WP
- Clean up the SQL tables
- Update decade-old plugins and replace a few with new ones
- Patch up the old theme to mostly work in the current version of WP and current themes
No guarantees for future updates, but I do have some ideas. Next up, I’m going to continue updating the theme, plugins, and other site infrastructure to something a little more recent. More soon, perhaps.
Leave a Reply