A friend of mine called me to see if I could help update the website of a band he manages, since “the guy” who usually did it was not texting him back lately and they had a single drop scheduled for the next day. Luckily my friend at least had a username and password.

I Googled the band name, used “dig” and “Whois” to ID the host, and logged in. Shared hosting, Cpanel, a browser-based file manager… suddenly I was taken back to being 20 years younger.

I pulled down index.html, put a copy back as index-backup.html, made some changes, put that file back up as index-temp.html and sent my friend the link. We got on a call and worked through some tweaks, and when it was ready I deleted index.html, renamed index-temp to just index, and it was live. Old-school deployment.

And to be clear, this is a real band: it’s their full-time job, multiple albums, they’ve played all the late night shows and an NPR Tiny Desk concert, etc. But really, they don’t need anything more than a couple of flat files that get updated every few months.