The Attack of the Ghost Site

Today I had a big scare, for I was working on revamping old posts when all of the sudden things started acting weird.

For context when I started this site I tried to import old posts, but they would come in jumbled, and more importantly to this the images were broken.

I was updating a blog post's image when it came out "broken" like I had seen before. I thought weird, so lets reload and try again.

Again to no avail, and then I tried going to the preview of the post to see what it looks like. Maybe the picture went through after all. As it happens I saw the 404 of my old Wordpress site, and I look up and in horror see the old menu. I click home, and it is my OLD SITE.

Not only is it my old decrepit wordpress site, but all of the blog posts seemed broken on Ghost. It was really weird to see the Ghost UI overlaying over the old site.

To put it in perspective they are on two different hosting providers, and are two completely separate content management systems.

The Trials of the Domain

As it happens the old domain does go through the old host, and the wordpress site still technically existed on the old service for this time. However it was stripped away from the domain name, and shouldn't have propagated as it did.

I was quick to blame the old host because there were no other offenders to see. They also had updated the user interface, which to me seemed a little too coincidental. Although I think now in retrospect it may not have been them after all (no worries I wasn't hard on them).

As it happens since the wordpress site existed, the plugins did as well, and two happened to have been updated in the meantime. One being the SSL certificate plugin, which is connected to cloudflare that hosted it. The cloudflare DID have the domain attached, and so perhaps the ghostly cache of the old site remained on their servers.

When it updated, it must have sent a signal to the domain to refresh as that old site. Temporarily erasing the new one, that I've been spending the past three months to get going.

A New Age and Propagation

All the energy I was going to spend on working on blog posts instead went to the fixing of the site. I got it to work, and fixed the domain name servers. Checked the images, and they all were working fine. I was super worried I was going to have to go back again to reinput all those blog header images.

Just makes me feel relaxed to know that the site is back to working order. Definitely made me realize how important PolyInnovator is to me, and how much I treat it like it is my baby. lol

The ideas I share, content I create, and the people I meet. They all originate from this online presence, without it I feel like I am losing a part of myself. Definitely need to expand my reach even farther than omnichannel, so that I can make sure the legacy lives on.

No attacks from the ghosts of old site pasts will hinder me from progressing forward.