Migration

Goodbye Drupal, welcome Hugo!

15 years ago I migrated this website to the popular CMS Drupal. At first I loved Drupal, it was a nice and shiny tool for managing my content without having to deal with designing the appearance of the site. Over the years, however, I realized that running a dynamic website also has a cost, and that cost is keeping the software that drives the site up-to-date. With Drupal that cost is substantial: Security updates are constantly pouring in, and upgrading Drupal to a major new version invariably also means a major amount of work to be done. The latest upgrade to Drupal 8 in 2018, for instance, took me about two weeks to complete!

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Migrating from iPhoto to digikam

This is a longish story about how I migrated my photo library from Apple's discontinued iPhoto application to the open source program digikam (version 5.9.0 beta from March 2018). If you follow a similar migration path and make the same decisions as I did on what data to keep and what data to discard, then I hope you will find a reusable solution in this story. These are the pieces:

  • An AppleScript for the initial iPhoto export
  • A shell script for post-processing and preparing the exported data for the digikam import
  • The instructions how to configure digikam to make the import work
  • Optional cleanup work and sync'ing back of metadata to image files

A warning before you dig in: Although I have tried to explain everything in as much detail as I could, you should be prepared for surprises and an arduous migration - it certainly was for me.

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Bye bye Subversion

A few months ago, after a brief encounter with svk, I became interested in distributed version control systems (or DSCMs). I soon decided that I wanted to move away from Subversion - not because I didn't like SVN anymore, but because I saw an interesting new technical challenge, and also because I thought (and still think) that knowing how to work with a DSCM is a valuable skill to employers. After a brief comparison of the most prominent open source DSCMs (Bazaar, Git, Mercurial), I decided to go with Git.

Today I finally completed the migration from Subversion to Git repositories. The following links are in operation as of now:

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