Since so called reboots and remakes seem to be very successful in Hollywood and the movie industry in general, I thought I could try it as well with my blog.

I’ve been running this blog since 2005, sometimes even producing more than one article per month. Not everything I wrote has been very substantial but I had my moments.

For more than six years this blog was running with Serendipity (S9y), a blogging software written in PHP running on MySQL or PostgreSQL. S9y is by far not a bad piece of software but it felt more and more dated compared to other modern blog software like Wordpress. Although I feel that the code quality of S9y is much better than that of Wordpress the lack of plugins kind of bothered me.

I also realized that I hadn’t blogged a single article since I returned from Saudi Arabia and I began to think about closing the blog altogether. Many of the things I posted, like videos or single pictures nowadays better fit on services like Twitter or social networks like Facebook and Google+ (depending on the intended audience) but there’ve been longer technical articles as well which do not fit on any of the aforementioned services.

By coincidence I recently stumbled across Octopress, a static site generator based on jekyll and being delivered with a lot of preconfigured and tested plugins. I liked the simple concept and decided to migrate my blog from the dynamically generated blog pages to static pages generated by Octopress.

In order to convert my older blog articles to the new format I wrote a small migrator for jekyll which takes Serendipity’s full RSS feed and creates appropriate Markdown files for jekyll. Apart from some encoding issues (which are YAML’s fault really) this worked quite well. I also had to do some post-processing because of sloppy or broken markup in the articles themselves, but it finally worked out very well. Even the old hyperlinks are still working which is quite cool. :)

This is much better than my Plan B would’ve been: running wget -m [...] on the S9y archive pages and putting the files in my blog’s document root. Unfortunately I haven’t converted the (few) comments to my blog posts yet because Disqus doesn’t provide an import for S9y and S9y doesn’t provide a comments export in any supported format. As much as I liked having them imported, I’ll probably just prune them – unless someone has advice on how to get them from Serendipity into Disqus.

So here we are with this new and shiny blog, with a lot of fresh ideas and none of them finished. Until I come up with new amazing and awesome blog posts you can relive all the glory of the past six and a half years in the archives. ;)