By Eric J Gruber
Published on: 2026-02-20
For many years I used to have a WordPress blog at ericjgruber.com.
In 2025, my domain expired. I thought I had it all set up correctly for auto renewal, but apparently that wasn’t the case. January 2025 was a particularly off time for me because my father died, and in the mix of the calamity that happens after a death in the family I lost track that it had expired.
By the time I realized what had happened it was too late. I was beyond the grace period. I couldn’t get it back. Some jerkfaces purchased the domain and made it into something awful, so I took another route.
You gotta known when to hold ‘em, or know when to fold ‘em.
I decided to start over.
There is nothing like death to make you rethink things. Not that this was my first experience, for sure. My mother died suddenly in 2018. And now with dad gone, it seemed like a good opportunity to reboot.
The losses got me to re-evaluate other things, such as the platform I wanted to keep writing on. This site is powered by Astro, and the content is created (at least for the blog posts) using Markdown files. Plain text, simple, and easily opened by any text editor. I like that.
Fidding around with databases and PHP upgrades seemed a bit much for a simple, one-person blog. But this, this is nice. Working with the frontend tools are satisfying, and working with Astro reminds me of my days learning PHP.
Fortunately I was able to download the database from my old site, and will work to re-integrate those writings into this framework.
But for now I will build a little, do a little data extraction, and get this show back on the road.
Thanks for reading!