What the Hell Happened to DagonDogs.com?

If you are one of the special few visitors of DagonDogs.com who has been with us since before July 2019 and you have also managed to return to the website after our sudden and long hiatus, you may be wondering the very question that is the title of this article. First, thanks for coming back! Second, please allow me to explain…

This site originally started off as an offshoot of my band’s website: HoundsofInnsmouth.com. It was a sub-domain that was meant to be a blog for the band where the members could all post their thoughts, events, or other bands they thought were worth discussing, on a platform other than Facebook. Both sites were hosted on HostGator and both eventually used Wordpress. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was the only one with the interest of posting regularly, so the site went from being a band blog to DagonDogs.com: Ariel’s blog space for video games, movies, music, and other random ramblings.

Time passed and the website chugged along with the occasional update to the look and feel to match the standards other websites had already abandoned for years—I’ve always been a bit late when it comes to trends and styles. There were the occasional (more frequently than I would like) situations where the site would go down because of an issue with the hosting site, or with a Wordpress plugin conflicting with the theme. I was certainly frustrated by these moments, but there was usually something I was learning in the process that made the bitter pill easier to swallow. I’m moderately tech-savvy, but I’m no developer, so the process of learning how to host and manage a website was a daunting one that I feel like I never even got close to mastering. I learned a lot about how it’s all organized, stored, and how it all functions. Nonetheless, I was still unprepared for what would happen on the weekend of July 4th, 2019.

After 5 years of existence, DagonDogs.com was something of a bloated mess of a website. The YouTube video posts were meant to quickly fill up the space with content, but I never stopped posting them. As the site grew and I had written more and more posts and reviews, there simply became too many empty pages that overshadowed the articles that took much more effort and time. It was disorganized, slow, and unresponsive. I knew it, but I was procrastinating when it came to doing something about restructuring it, because I still hated the process of trying to do so through the hosting tools I had available. I wanted to do it myself, because that’s who I am as a person and I still wanted the opportunity to learn from the experience, I just didn’t want to have to go through the trouble. HostGator served it’s purpose for the time, but the tools were archaic and hardly user-friendly for someone like myself who only had a limited knowledge of the process of website management.

In the spring of 2019, I got an alert upon logging into the Wordpress authoring space of DagonDogs.com that it was time to finally upgrade the PHP version of the domain. My version had become obsolete and Wordpress would cease to function in the coming months if I didn’t upgrade. I’d had some experience editing the PHP files for the site in the past, so I knew that something like this would be a risky procedure, especially when it came to something that was going to be done on the hosting side, and not just within the Wordpress editing software. Upon seeing this alert I did three things:

• Research what the process was for upgrading the PHP of the site

• Perform a complete backup of the sites I had, with images, compressed Wordpress files, and SQL directories

• Look into Squarespace as possible option in the future

The articles that were provided to me about what it would take to upgrade the PHP were deceptively optimistic and simple. It sounded like all I had to do was back up everything, remove the plugins, and click a button before shouting “Viola!” and I’d have a new updated website. Even HostGator’s articles about updating the PHP version were just as friendly and hopeful. Skeptical as I always am, I still naively bought into this idea that, so long as I back everything up, I should be able to fix my site within the three-day weekend and restore everything to the way it was if anything goes wrong. If something were to happen, I thought I would be able to bring it back up before looking into other hosting options or an opportunity to port DagonDogs.com to something a little easier to use. As you might suspect, I was very wrong.

After doing another full backup of everything I could think to grab, I clicked the small, innocuous, innocent, harmless-looking “Update PHP” button. Unlike previous times when the site went down, where I could still access some basic HTML format of the site, or make a small change to the index files to get a version working, this small button basically destroyed the website beyond repair. There was no way to undo pressing that button. I tried returning it to the previous PHP version it was using. I tried a full system restore through the hosting site. I tried deleting everything and uploading it all back again. I did all that I could think of, short of having someone else build it for me all over again.

So, on July 4th, I closed my laptop, went out to the backyard with a beer, and sat. I thought about my options and what I could do. I had been meaning to restructure and reorganize DagonDogs.com for a while and I had unwittingly forced my own hand. It was time to get the site looking and functioning like a real website that actually worked on mobile devices and didn’t take forever to load. However, I was also hopelessly depressed about how much I had screwed up on my own and didn’t want to even think about doing what needed to be done. With a 2-week-long vacation that was going to start in less than a week, I wasn’t about to do a damn thing about it in July.

In August, I finally decided that I was through trying to learn all the tools of website hosting and would just rather leave that to people better versed in the process. So, I did what so many other people have done who listen to podcasts on a regular basis. I joined Squarespace and started looking at what I could do to get 5 years-worth of blog posts back up on the internet without losing the old URLs and SEO data that had accumulated over the years—even though this really hadn’t brought many new visitors.

Unfortunately for me, the various plugins I had used with Wordpress on the old version of the site had made the process of importing the backup files I had into the Squarespace version of the site pretty much impossible. This was both a curse and a painful blessing. It forced me to actually get my hands dirty and do what I knew needed to be done. I had to rebuild this thing from the ground up.

So now, with the great unveiling of the site you likely have never heard of, you’re looking at a Frankenstein’s-monster of old blog posts and video game playthroughs. It hasn’t been exactly easy or convenient, but a majority of the content has been restored with the same URLs. Some of the articles have been lost/abandoned for the sake of convenience, or just because it doesn’t seem worth it to repost them, but I’m certainly more satisfied with how DagonDogs.com looks now. In order to get all my old posts back up with the same URLs I had to do some creative archiving with different pages for the old posts. If you have ever read any of my old articles on the original site and wish to read them again, you can find them in archive pages, organized by year and subject. Sadly, the process of re-publishing the content this way has been a frustrating struggle because, despite Squarespace’s website building tools being satisfactory, the authoring tools kind of suck.

It’s all web-based authoring in a window that sits atop the page, meaning that there are a lot of Javascript pieces operating in the background that tend to get a bit temperamental after hours of copying and pasting content into the window. Buttons stop working, windows stop resizing, and posting becomes impossible, eventually. This usually would cause me to stop for the day after a few primal screams in frustration. It didn’t help that the back-up files I was using were in an XML format that could not so easily be copy and pasted into the authoring space to fit the intended appearance of the article. This, combined with the needlessly complicated process of locating and uploading the right images to the right spots in each article, made something as simple as the two-step process of copy & paste more of a twelve-step program.

Thus, it has taken me about 4 months to get DagonDogs.com back up and running again on my own. Hopefully, with the more useful and user-friendly tools of Squarespace, it will operate better and receive more traffic than it ever did when I was struggling to learn how to be a website administrator. Hopefully, the performance and the organization of the new site will make it a more pleasant browsing and reading experience for everyone. I also hope that, with the new tools available, I’ll be able to bring more interesting content to the domain. For those of you have have returned after our long break, Thank You! For those of you who have never heard of us before, Welcome!

Thanks for reading.