Bit rot and starting over

My last big redesign for my website was in February 2018. I had just started my first grown-up web development job and I wanted it to feel confident and understated. In the years following I made updates now and then (namely to the music log), but didn’t feel the need to do another big redesign. I wasn’t using the site as a blog so it never stayed in the front of my mind for long; there were times when I was months late to renew the security certificate or update what I was reading and playing or where I was working. And…maybe no one cared! Now I forget whether I even had any analytics to see if my site got much traffic at all.

Recently I started fiddling around with this site again to see if I could add a couple new pieces – maybe connect the “currently reading” part to pull from Goodreads, or make myself a couple private graphs to visualize whether I’m making progress in this or that area of life. Unfortunately I only got a day or two in before realizing that my site had caught bit rot, and it wasn’t clear if it would be possible to cure it.

“Bit rot” happens when software gradually stops working. Maybe a dependency goes offline so the software can’t get built anymore, or updating one part causes the rest of it to fall apart. Sometimes bit rot can be kept away just by stopping by every couple months to open the windows, sweep, dust, and update things here and there. If you wait too long it can become difficult to remember how everything fits together; other times it’s outside of your control and some api or package you don’t control falls apart, screwing you over. Big enterprises have to find a way to salvage it all (that’s part of what I do for my day job), but with smaller projects it sometimes isn’t worth the hassle, and is easier to throw everything out and start over.

The truth is that I smelled bit rot a couple years ago when I got a new computer, and some combination of old Node, old Webpack, old Ruby, and old Middleman didn’t play well with it anymore. I had some things to update quickly and I just did them in place on the live server, and figured I’d get around to syncing everything up again later 🙃. A few weeks ago “later” finally arrived and after some careful “precision updates,” followed by some big “sledgehammer updates,” followed by a lot of pacing and sighing, I made a new repo and started over with Hugo. If you’re reading this, that means I have it working and deploying, and the old site has been put to rest (even if the visual design is the same).

It’s easy to draw a parallel between bit rot and any number of other parts of life; the “rot” in the name is already an analogy on its own. I’m sure I haven’t learned my lesson, but I’m taking the opportunity to start something new instead of being sad about what’s gone. One reason I wanted to return to “my own corner of the internet” was because a type of rot is creeping through most big software nowadays – sites get slower, links die, ads multiply, and most algorithm-based online spaces seem bleak or overrun with bot-generated “content.” Hopefully I can at least keep the place swept and aired out every now and then.