PDD Shop Talk: Rebuilding After the Rebuild

One month ago, Perfect Duluth Day completed a long overdue WordPress theme conversion. Since then, we’ve been slowly touching up elements of the website that were thrown out of whack in the process. Those tedious chores will never end, of course, because we’re striving for sweet, elusive perfection here.

For those who are interested, I’ll elaborate below. Those of you who wish to pay no attention to what’s behind the curtain can certainly feel free to skip ahead to the next post and avoid the technobabble. The gist of the story is that PDD started to fall apart, we took a long time to fix it, eventually we did, and now we want to emphasize how difficult it was.

And, of course, we precede that with the usual money grovel.

Keeping Duluth’s Duluthiest website running with new content every day has been an ongoing financial challenge for 23 years, but Perfect Duluth Day is still here, still free to read and still kicking out the daily goods. Advertising revenue keeps the operation going, but donations help us do more and do it better.

So if you appreciate the thorough listings of hoopla on the PDD Calendar and/or the features on the PDD Blog, kindly drop a few bucks in the PayPal account. It is much appreciated.

And now, about that theme conversion …

It wasn’t a facelift. Perfect Duluth Day was fully rebuilt. The final process took about about seven months, but prior to that we spent six years planning, attempting and failing to pull it off, spending heaps of money on outside web developers before ultimately learning the only way to get it done would be to ruin our tech director’s life and make him do all the heavy lifting and most of the light lifting.

At last, we finally think the accumulated duct-tape fixes of the past have been replaced with a website we can actually maintain.

It wasn’t the rebuild that was complicated, however. It was the massive data migration. Perfect Duluth Day is 23 years old, and content from 17 of those years is part of our current WordPress framework. Moving all that data without losing large amounts of it required a lot of skillful coordination.

Every post, comment, event and image in WordPress has an identification number — like a coat-check ticket. We had to build a new site while operating the old site — so both versions of the site were alive for several months. The old site kept publishing while we built the new site, and both sites were handing out coat-check tickets from the same roll. If ticket #50,000 meant a blog post on one site and an unrelated photo on the other, merging them would scramble everything.

So the number 2,000,000 was added to the ticket number of all items from the old version of the site. Old post #14,000 became #2,014,000 — to prevent it from colliding with anything new. It’s a simple idea, but it had to be applied perfectly across more than 15,000 posts, 70,000 images, 60,000 comments, 4,000 event calendar listings and their related data, and every hidden connection between them (which image goes with which post, which comment belongs to which article). Wherever a number might be off, things quietly point to the wrong place and we have a mess.

That system is why Perfect Duluth Day survived the move intact, and why the stuff that was broken is hopefully findable and fixable instead of just gone.

Here are a few notes from our web director, Cory Fechner, from after the new site launched:

Launch Day: Pointed the internet at the new site and updated about 12,000 places in the database that still referred to the old temporary address. Basically 12,000 change-of-address forms.

The Quizzes: A decade of PDD Quizzes came through with amnesia. Quizzes forgot their questions, then questions forgot their pictures. The quiz plugin changed how it stores things over the years (of course it did), so it took four separate repairs. Every quiz back to 2017 now works. Questions, answers, images, all verified.

The Hiccup: Site went down about 20 minutes after the launch. Turns out when a “new” site with thousands of event pages shows up online, every robot on the internet shows up at once to read it, and they trample the place. Got it back up fast and put a bouncer at the door (bot protection). Real visitors were never affected.

In summary:

• Years of costly failed attempts to save PDD from imploding.
• Months of rebuilding.
• A renumbering trick.
• A robot stampede.
• Finally, PDD lives on in a stable environment, better than ever, but still needing some touchups.

We are certain there are hidden problems with the new site that we haven’t found yet, so please, if you notice anything buggy email paul @ perfectduluthday.com and we’ll add it to the big ol’ list of tasks.

Eventually we hope to direct less of our attention to managing technological chaos and more of it to creating informative and amusing content. In another month we might be there.