Last week, I upgraded the server that this site runs on to Debian 13 (also known as Trixie), and the corresponding version of Sympl. This ended up being a fresh installation of Debian; I tried and in-place upgrade and, well, let’s just say it went badly wrong and the virtual machine wouldn’t boot. Whoops.
A sign that I only partially learn from my mistakes is that this is basically what happened when I lost everything in 2018. However, this time I did have backups, thanks to the UpDraft Plus WordPress plugin. And, whilst I didn’t do a backup immediately before the aborted upgrade like I should have done, I did have one that was only about a week out of date. Furthermore, this included some blog posts that were written but not yet published at the time, so I didn’t even lose those. Phew.
The upgrade to Debian 13 means that I’m running a newer version of PHP. Debian 12 ships with PHP 8.2 and I had added a custom repository to upgrade this to PHP 8.3. Debian 13 includes PHP 8.4, and so I no longer get a warning message in WordPress’ Site Health checker. It’s not the latest version – that’s PHP 8.5 – but it’s newer.
The existing server image had been in place for just over a year, when I moved from Bytemark to Hosting UK, and the last time I upgraded Debian was in 2023. Doing a fresh install every now and again should help to keep things running better, hopefully.
Hopefully, you won’t notice anything different about the blog, apart from some of the sidebar widgets missing. I’ll get these restored in time.
