Migrated to Jekyll
I first started this blog back in October 2004. Back then, I used a now-defunct blog engine written by some friends of mine — JAWS, or Just Another Weblog System.
My blog remained with JAWS for four years, but by February 2008, I decided to switch over to Drupal 5; I needed to properly evaluate it in order to use it at work, so I migrated my blog to use Drupal instead. And behold! You can still look at my half-decent and quite long (and specific to my site) JAWS to Drupal 5 migration script!
The upgrade to Drupal 6 was quite uneventful. I don’t remember (and cannot find) when it happened, but it didn’t scare or scar me forever. But, even when I most embraced Drupal 7 (I adopted the Debian packages in 2013, and have kept it at least up to date with the each time less frequent updates), I never got around to do the 6→7 migration on my personal website. Yes, because I don’t want to migrate a sh!tload of posts by hand… And could not be bothered to produce a script to decently replicate the whole thing.
Several months ago, having already decided to switch to a static blog engine, I came across Jekyll. Being a rubyist myself, I started thinking about it… half-seriously.
I started taking it more seriously when I found Jekyll can be persuaded to import whole Drupal6 sites (as well as sites in many other engines). Of course, having added several modules and created a nontrivial structure and data set… So I hacked up a (much smaller than last time!) importer script to do the heavy lifting. And later, did quite a bit of tweaking on the results…
…But was still quite a bit from satisfied. So… In the end, I have to thank my hosting company:
After many years, Dreamhost dropped support for PHP 5.x, making Drupal6 no longer usable. Which, although forced me to work, is very good. PHP5 has been end-of-lifed for over a year, Drupal6 ended its support four long years ago…. And only unforgivable slackers like myself were still running that old code!
Of course, there are myriads of things to fix in my now-somewhat-broken-and-ugly site. But, at least, I managed to keep it semi-functional; over 2500 posts (including images, random stuff I wrote over sixteen years, and whatever extras need to be added to the list) were migrated. Sadly, only a few URLs were correctly preserved… But I trust the world will come to understand and fix the issue ☺
So… I hope I don’t mess with your RSS feeds. My blog now has no comments enabled, which is a shame, but I don’t want to fall over to commercial providers such as Disqus (which would be easily doable with Jekyll). We are commentless… At least for the time being.