Capital controls & Rebuilding arsdementis.com
With the economic situation in Greece and the advent of capital controls, for a while, I had no means to pay for my rented VPS linux box in France. After a month or so, my VPS provider decided to scrap my VPS and down went arsdementis.com with it.
The importance of regular backups
It's not that I'm inherently lazy, it's more that I do a million different things at the same time and I tend to prioritize with personal criteria. For this reason, my backups of the VPS were not very recent. I kept thinking that I should script it so they're done automatically but I kept postponing it instead. With that in mind I had to remake a lot of the modifications I had done over a year to the site and that sounded like a real chore. So I decided to scrap the old Adobe Flash based design (I had decided on the previous design, some years ago, when I thought it would be cool to learn ActionScript3), which was rather heavy and remake the website from scratch using HTML5 Responsive design. Responsive here means that the new site is also friendly to tablets, smartphones, etc devices as the viewport should (and I say should cause it's quite possible I've made a mistake here and there) adjust to the available screen space of the device. It did take me a while to find the spare time to bother with it (yeah I'm a DIY person by nature) but it's finally ready. It will probably change a bit over the course of time and this time I'll really automate backups. Ha!