Bye-bye Mephisto…

… Hello WordPress. Mephisto is sadly dead (http://mephistoblog.com/ points to a WordPress page, need I say more) and the application was broken after a recent upgrade of the server, so I’ve decided to move.

I did want to save as much of the original blog as possible though (what little there is), and so I had to find the most recent github-hosted copy and try to get things to work again. On top of that Ruby’s “gems” system is not playing nice with Debian’s apt and my original PostgreSQL database got hosed during an upgrade from 8.1 to 8.4. This last is not a fault in PostgreSQL, but rather Debian, which decided to wipe 8.1 and purge the databases of it before I had a chance to migrate them over. I ended up restoring a backup of the tables and fire up PostgreSQL 8.1 with it on an old 32-bit etch installation (yes, it was that old), dump the databases and restore them on PgSQL 8.4.

After that, I thought it was a matter of using the mephisto-to-wxr rake task to migrate my contents, but alas, I needed to patch that one as well, as the uuidtools gem did not support random_generate() any more. Resolved that by changing:

xml.guid "urn:uuid:#{UUID.random_create}", "isPermaLink" => "false"

to:

xml.guid "urn:uuid:#{Time.now.to_i.to_s}-#{n}", "isPermaLink" => "false"

… and incrementing n on each iteration.

So, now I have a .wxr feed that I need to import. Fingers crossed…