Updates Completed

First off, unless you’re into technology, you may not have much interest in reading this actual post. Part of my reason for writing this post is also just to test how things are working and checking for issues that may trip any of us up when we want to write a real post. I plan to do a real post tomorrow morning that takes a look at the current storm, potentially colder storms next week, and the sale of Bear Valley Ski Area. My feelings won’t be hurt if you skip reading this post and wait for the next one. Touche to Chris, who suggested on Facebook today that none of these off season posts matter. Ouch.

Why We Updated

The internet is a great thing when it works correctly. When it does not work correctly, bad things happen. Instead of seeing pictures of powder skiing or the latest weather report at Unofficial Alpine, you instead get redirected to some gambling site in China or someone who is selling DogeCoin in SriLanka. So keeping your website secure from all of those potential malware infections is a serious business. I try and stay ahead of that game, because if you do pick up malware, you have two choices. One is to spend a lot of money having someone else fix it, or spending a lot of time rebuilding your site.

The number one risk for malware comes with letting components of your site become outdated. Coders are constantly updating their code to prevent malware. Applying updates is important. Over the last 6 months, we have been unable run many of those updates. Ultimately, it came down to the fact that Unofficial Alpine had gained too much weight. We had amassed almost 2,500 posts over the last dozen years that included more than 10,000 photos. That’s a significant load for a website that is run on a shoestring. Ultimately, it was preventing us from backing up the website before doing any of those updates. Running big updates without a backup is a recipe for disaster.

What We Did

• Spent a day weeding out a bunch of old posts, about 40% of the total posts. I know, history…blah, blah, blah. The posts I chose to delete were the basic weather and ski reports from 2012 through 2017. I saved anything that had historical value for Alpine Meadows or that covered something special. The next task was to sift through the 3,500 orphaned photos that were now unattached to a post, and delete most of those. For what it is worth, I do have older backups of the site on a USB drive that still contain all of that stuff and it could be restored someplace. Honestly, those older posts represent about 0.000001% of daily traffic on this site with three exceptions: the guide to Safeway, the Atomic Rex ski review, and the review of Andy Wirth on Undercover Boss. After the weight loss program, I was able to run complete backups gain. Hallelujah!
• Installed a new WordPress theme called “Neve” that is completely up to date and currently supported by its authors. That allowed me to delete the old theme and several plug-ins it required that are no longer being updated. The new theme is very similar to the one it replaced.
• Updated PHP to version 8.3 instead of 7.4. All updates for the older version of PHP ended this month. PHP is the underlying software code that makes WordPress run. Having the old version was a big liability. The old theme was not compatible with PHP 8, so it was a mandatory change.
• Updated the WordPress application to the newest version. Again running the older version was a big liability.

Changes You Might Notice

We’ve only been running the older “Heap” theme for a couple of seasons now, and the look is still reasonably fresh. It was my goal to keep the look and the feel relatively the same. The subscription signup form moved from the right side bar to the main menu. Hopefully, getting everything up to date will help us find a solution to the missing photos issue for email subscribers using Apple devices. Also, the new theme does not include an immediate option for “likes” on each post. Nobody really used those like anyways. Roughly 0.001% of readers clicked the like button. I guess we are not very good writers. Everything else is really close to “how it was”.

Ultimately, all of our changes went really smoothly today, resulting in a grand total of about 60 seconds of total downtime and about one hour where things may have seemed a bit funky. We still have some minor fine tuning to do and that will continue. Writing and posting this post is a part of our testing. Thanks for reading it if you’re still here. Here’s a bigger thanks for supporting UA through the years.

Mark Fisher, Owner