Jonas Voss

At IWC in Dusseldorf in May, I managed to break my old website. I broke it, while I was trying to fix it, so that I could export all my old posts, and import them into Known that runs this site. Turns out updating a site with code written in 2003-6 from PHP 5.x to 7.2 can result in a number of things. The main thing being that the site doesn't work any longer.

Not long after IWC I went to one of the meetups in HWC where Calum and Neil were kind to lend me some of their coding and troubleshooting expertise, and guided me to find what had broken. The main issue was that some mysql functions had changed names altogether, and Neil also managed to figure out that variables no longer had global scope, so everything had to get an overhaul.

After the overhaul, the site was loading, but wasn't displaying any posts, and I didn't manage to get that sorted, and I wasn't sure where to start, to be honest. Today, I decided to see if I could fix it, and it turned out ereg_replace doesn't exist anymore, and I use it for some god awful function that converts the plain text of my entries stored in the database, into marked up paragraphs. I didn't manage to figure out how to get that function to work again, so instead I removed it altogether.

The downside is that the text of my posts on my old blog has no paragraphs, but that can be fixed later. The considerable upside is, that my old site is available again, and that I can now focus on figuring out how to get all the entries imported into this site, so that all my old entries can get indiewebified.

#iwc #php #known #hwc #indieweb

Holiday is on, and apart from relaxing with the family, I aim to look into a bunch of stuff before I'm back at the factory in January.

My Indieweb life is coming on well, thanks to Known, and the #indieweb community in London. I attended my first couple of Homebrew Website Club meetups in town in 2018, and although my contributions to the community so far is non-existant, I'm very glad to have met a handful of people to talk indieweb stuff with in person, on a regular basis. I've also logged onto the Indieweb slack/IRC channel where I'm a regular lurker.

One thing I'd like to do is, to import all the posts from my homegrown CMS into Known, so they get equipped with all the indieweb goodness which is part and parcel of Known. I've had comments turned off on my own CMS for years, because I gave up dealing with the deluge of spam coming in through the comments form. I'd like to have comments back. Known has an import feature which will let me import Wordpress RSS-feeds (which my old blog produces), so it should be possible. I did try a few weeks ago and wasn't successful, but I gather with a bit of tinkering I can make it work.

On the selfhosting front I'm very happy with my current inventory (bookmark service from Shaarli, Tiny Tiny RSS for reading feeds, dokuWiki for documenting/notes), but I also want to host more stuff. In particular, I'd like to try to run my own instance of Mattermost. With my current hosting provider, that option is a bit limited. As long as whatever service I want to selfhost has very standard requirements, such as PHP and MySQL, to run, then I'm fine. But I find that more and more of the things I would like to try to selfhost, requires a bit more, such as artisan, go, docker, and a bunch of other things that I either a) never heard of before or b), have heard of before, but have no clue about.

I will sign up for a month of VPS with one of the providers in the field, and try out a few things. It might be overkill, but then at least I'll know I'm in way over my head, and I can return to my shared hosting, and whatever that allows me to install.

Happy holidays (: