So — funny story.

I was walking down the road the other day, and boom! my optimix.dev website on Digital Ocean stopped working. Shocking, right?

Ok, it wasn’t a complete surprise…I was sending some commands to the server.

What do you mean, “Was it serious?”. I was just tweaking it a bit, you know.

Alright, I guess you could call an Ubuntu 17–22 OS upgrade “serious”. I mean, black holes and neutron stars are certainly serious. Are OS upgrades really on the same level? I suppose it’s all very subjective.

Backup. Backup. That word sounds familiar, but if you keep repeating it, it starts to sound strange and unfamiliar. Backup. Fun fact — this concept of repetition causing a word or phrase to lose its meaning for the listener temporarily is called semantic satiation.

Oh well.

I’d mentioned earlier that I had abandoned (rather, left frozen) my WordPress website optimix and moved over to writing here instead. Today, I wandered back to see how things looked (much like one visits an old town that they had lived in previously). I realized that something was wrong, equations that I had typeset in LaTeX using the KaTeX plugin weren’t rendering; in fact, they were throwing an ugly error. I looked further into my WordPress admin page to discover that auto-updates were unavailable for the plugin. Then I headed over to the plugin page on the WordPress website, to learn that the plugin had been “closed” (whatever that meant) as of July 9^th, 2024, because of some “Guideline Violation”. What the heck!?

Fortunately, it turned that the already-installed plugin was actually working just fine, all I had to do was unblock JavaScript in my browser (which I’d turned off by default via NoScript and forgotten about). For now, though I don’t get further updates for the plugin, it continues to function correctly.

I am still curious to know what that supposed “Guideline Violation” is.