A great old gum tree was felled today. It sat in our neighbour’s front yard, its branches hanging precariously over our garage roof. It was a beautiful tree, with red-brown bark contrasting with its green leaves.

But the great tree was dying. The greenery had retreated from the ends of the branches, which stood bare and dry. Eventually that green would disappear altogether, forever. It was only a matter of time before a summer storm would shear the wood and send it crashing into a roof or worse.

My web host, Webfaction, is shutting up shop. I’m hurriedly working to migrate my content to a new host. I’m also taking the opportunity to tidy up some branches.

I have content that dates back to the 1990’s. But, like the tree, old technologies and code eventually wither and die. I’ve already ported this content from static HTML, custom PHP scripts, Drupal and elsewhere.

I’ve decided to consolidate the content into the platform I’m most familiar with due to my job: WordPress. I’m importing the static and custom PHP content into self-hosted WordPress. I’ve also decided to move at least on of my Blogger hosted blogs here into allrite.blog.

It’s a lot of work and still ongoing. Migration of websites is one of the things I least like doing in my job and here I am not only dealing with content, but servers, domains, security and email. Hopefully the end result will be more secure, more modern and easier to maintain.

We took advantage of the tree loppers to get a large palm removed from our property at the same time, the crane lifting it over our fence. That’s less prickly garden content to maintain.

A new tree will replace the old, breathing new life into the land. Both real and virtual renewed.