I brought Geextor back from the dead the same way I build robots in the basement: start with what I can prove, salvage what I can find, and keep the wiring simple.

Proof of life

Before I touched WordPress, I wanted to confirm Geextor actually mattered to anyone besides me. A quick search turned up two nice surprises:

• An Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange thread where someone literally drops my old motor-driver permalink as the answer: geextor.com/2016/11/20/driving-a-dc-motor-with-raspberry-pi/. That’s a clean link from a high-trust Q&A site. (Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange)
• An Electroyou build thread in Italian that also references the same post. The forum truncates the preview, but the geextor.com URL is right there. (electroyou.it)

Those links told me two things: (1) the date-style permalinks mattered, and (2) the L298N + Raspberry Pi article had to come back first.

Where I found the content

I pulled text from a mix of places: repos with Markdown/HTML fragments, my newer site where a few posts had migrated, and bits I still had in local notes. The nice twist: one of the revived posts even points to a Wayback snapshot of the GitHub repo for the little Pi car—turns out Past Me left breadcrumbs for Future Me. (geextor.com)

The rebuild

I kept the platform boring and dependable: WordPress with a store-bought theme and the classic date permalinks so old links resolve.

• The live site shows the posts you’d expect right on the front page—“Driving a DC Motor with Raspberry Pi,” “Simple Pi Car” parts, a 3D-printed harmonic drive, etc.—and the footer tells you what’s powering it. (geextor.com)
• The motor-driver tutorial is back at its original path with the wiring notes and Python snippet. If you’ve got a Pi, an L298N, and two GPIO pins, you’re set. (geextor.com)
• For the theme, I went pragmatic. The site currently runs Alpha Store (yep, a shop theme; it’s clean and loads fast). I can swap to a more “blog-classic” skin later, but this got the writing back online quickly. (geextor.com)

Under the hood I used a simple WordPress stack, imported posts with a WXR file, and set permalinks to:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

That one line preserves a decade-old URL contract, which makes those backlinks pay off immediately.

Hurdles

• Assets and exact timestamps: some images and publish times were fuzzy. I restored what I had, approximated the rest, and left notes to backfill as I uncover more.
• Comments reality check: I went looking for resurrected Disqus threads. The current pages show native WordPress comments (“Leave a Reply”) and no Disqus embed, plus a blunt “No comments to show” in the sidebar. That means I’ll need to enable Disqus (same shortname) and let it map threads to the now-live canonical URLs. (geextor.com)

The fun parts

• The backlinks weren’t just vanity; they guided the recovery order. I brought back the motor-driver article first, verified the exact URL worked, and only then filled in the rest. The StackExchange and Electroyou links now resolve again. (Electrical Engineering Stack Exchange, electroyou.it)
• Past Me sprinkled archive links inside posts (like the Pi car repo on Wayback). That saved time chasing missing GitHub history. (geextor.com)

What’s restored now

If you’re here to build something, start with these:

• Driving a DC Motor with Raspberry Pi — overview, wiring, and a starter Python script. (geextor.com)
• Simple Pi Car series — server setup and a web-controlled rover, plus a link to the archived repo. (geextor.com)
• 3D-Printed Harmonic-Planetary hybrid — proof-of-concept gearing experiment with photos. (geextor.com)

What I’ll still tighten up

• Re-enable Disqus with the original shortname so legacy threads can attach to the revived URLs; keep WordPress comments as a fallback. (Pages currently show native comments only.) (geextor.com)
• Backfill missing images and exact timestamps where I can find better archives.
• Add a quick Search Console pass so Google re-indexes the revived posts, starting with the L298N article.

Closing

Geextor’s back because the internet remembered those posts even when I didn’t. The basement projects, the wiring diagrams, the “try this exact pinout” instructions—that’s what people linked to. I followed the links home, rebuilt the paths, and flipped the lights on. If you arrived from an old bookmark, welcome back. If you’re new, the motor spins the same way it always did.