Time to rebuild Chartist Ancestors - wish me luck

There may be some disruption to the Chartist Ancestors website over the summer. If so, I apologise, and can only suggest you try again later.

I built the site way back in 2003 - long enough ago in real life, but almost into pre-history for a website. But since then, while the site has grown and added pages, photos and other resources, it has not really evolved to keep pace with technology.

The plan now is to rebuild it from the ground up using Wordpress, which ought to make it easier to manage and be a lot nicer to look and and find your way round. This should in theory be relatively straightforward, but I am not a techie, so things may will go wrong.

Step one was to back up the site to my desktop. I now need to change every page URL to get rid of capital letters (so www.chartists.net/Traflagar-Square_riots_1848 becomes www.chartists.net/traflagar-square_riots_1848).

This is because step two is to migrate the site from Windows OS servers to Linux OS servers, and apparently Linux doesn't like capital letters).

And that in turn is because Wordpress only operates on Linux, not Windows. On the way I have to create an SQL database.

Having done all that, I can then start to build the new site.

All of which should be the most enormous fun. I am hoping that the site won't totally disappear at any point - at least not for too long. The aim is to keep it up and running as it is for now then switch over once the new site is ready.

Fingers crossed...