Slept and slept and dreamt and slept, eating almost nothing, doing almost nothing, until at last in this dawn I started to feel my mojo come back just a little, blinking into the daylight past a kitchen sideboard full of dirty dishes.

I did make sure to put in my short shifts here, and with what little energy was left over I started to think about the long-term health of this project. It led me to places I didn’t expect.

At first it was just the idea of finding a plugin to do backups for this site and the wordpress database that powers it. It was slow grindy fruitless work. I found it frustrating because the plugins seemed to come in two flavors. There were the clearly for-profit ones with a lot of restrictions unless you paid for the ‘pro’ version–and yet every one of them had a boilerplate at the bottom of the listing that said: “Plugin X is open source software”, which means damn near nothing beyond the nice marketing sound of it.

Then there were a few that did list an actual software license, like the GPL, but for the most part seemed abandoned. “This plugin has not been tested with the last three major upgrades of WordPress” … not very reassuring.

Eventually I ended up back at the official WP Support page on Backups. Down in the fine print of it there was another link, to a page at https://codex.wordpress.org/UNIX%20Shell%20Skills. In spite of the nasty %20s in it (which stand in for spaces, which you shouldn’t ever use in filenames), this is my world-favorite link as of today. Because …

… it boils a lot of things that are opaque to me down to a language I speak somewhat fluently. “This article covers an advanced topic”, warns the banner. “Many WordPress users may not be familiar with using the shell to manage their file systems.” Oh but darling I am, I am. Please do go on.

What the page doesn’t do is give explicit instructions on how to do a full backup from the command line. But what it does do is to lay out some familiar tools on the workbench, and invite you to figure it out for yourself.

I’ll be back here a lot, I suspect, if only for inspiration along the same lines. To remind myself that you don’t always have to go looking for new software to solve your problems, and in fact there might almost always be a better alternative to doing so, for those with eyes to see.

And another thing!

Around the edges of the backup searching, I also found a plugin called Print My Blog. It’s designed to do just what the name says, which is pretty interesting point and click functionality. But also, they didn’t ask for money in a transactional way. Instead you get pointed to something that looks a lot like a Patreon page.

But instead of Patreon it’s called Open Collective.

In addition to the most excellent socialist vibe, I noticed something else. The authors of this rather tiny and specialized piece of Print-My-Blog software appear to be pulling down six or seven hundred a month from their backers.

That’s an extraordinary amount in context I think. When I visited the Patreon of Jesse Smith, the developer behind sysvinit (a big huge crucial piece of UNIX software), it said his revenue stream was $28 a month.

I wonder how and why that can be exactly.

I intend to study on it.