This site has been hosted on a few different services over the years, from WordPress.com to a Github-hosted Octopress install to Scriptogr.am. While I was traveling last week, I saw an announcement from Scriptogr.am that they’re shutting down on August 14. That’s not really a surprise — their site stopped working for me in Safari long ago, and it’s been littered with dead links for a while now.

I briefly considered migrating back to Octopress, or even building my own static system. Manton Reece’s recent migration to WordPress and instructions for microblogging have tipped me back towards a self-hosted WordPress install.

I started dipping my toes into the world of self-hosting earlier this year, and I have a Digital Ocean¹ VPS that runs a few static sites. Right now I’m hosting a test version of this site on that server, and I’m planning to redirect all of my existing URLs there before Scriptogr.am goes dark.

Digital Ocean provide great instructions for getting a WordPress install up and running on an Ubuntu VPS, which I was able to follow pretty easily. The only place I had to deviate from their guide was with some of the install paths, since I wanted to use the local directory /var/www/jeffvautin.com/ instead of /var/www/html/. Digital Ocean provides a second set of instructions for running multiple wordpress installations on a single server, and those instructions assume you’ll be storing the site somewhere other than /var/www/html/.

My plan is to document the migration; hopefully it will be useful to someone else, but mostly I’m making these notes for my own reference.