This blog has been alive in some form since 2002. As you can imagine a lot has changed in 18 years. The blog has moved physically from servers under desks, servers in closets, to finally virtual machines in the cloud. Even those VMs have changed AWS instance sizes and Ubuntu LTS versions over time. The blogging platform has also changed. I started this thing with a custom set of PHP pages that I wrote myself to pull entries from a MySQL database. I migrated to something called Serendipity for a while to get more features and then finally to WordPress. All the while the MySQL backend has been pretty much the same.
My photo sharing strategy has also changed. I moved from a directory of images, to Menalto Gallery, to Gallery3, and recently to Piwigo. Gallery3 has been unsupported for a VERY long time, but the nail in the coffin was that it required me to keep an older PHP version on the server. The switch to Piwigo allows me to ditch my Ubuntu PPAs for old PHP versions, and lets me use a photo sharing platform that receives updates, has themes, and works well on mobile.
The problem I face now is that in 18 years I’ve linked to a LOT of photos directly from the blog posts. In some places I wrote the HTML directly, in other places I inserted a link to an image using a WordPress block. In almost all of those cases I’m linking to Gallery3 album pages that no longer function. ALL of the older JPG images are still in the Gallery3 folders, taking up lots of space since they also exist in Piwigo.
I’m left with a few options:
- Go back and edit every single blog post that linked to images with the new Piwigo links.
- This may be easier if I create a LOT of permalinks inside Piwigo’s “category” structure for albums.
- Create some complicated mod_rewrite rule that intercepts the old links and sends to the new link.
- This will REQUIRE that I create a lot of permalinks in Piwigo.
- Put some boilerplate text at the top of every old post that points to the new high level photo gallery.
- Not great, because if I’ve learned anything – this won’t be the last platform migration I ever do.
- Do nothing. Leave the old links and images broken. Think only of now.
- This is tempting, but there is a lot of nostalgia in those old posts.
Wish me luck on this project. I still have some work to do, and next week I should have some time to focus on it.
Update 2020-04-29:
Crazy twist. I reinstalled a BUNCH of PHP packages from a custom PPA and replaced them with the default Ubuntu repo packages and now my old Gallery3 is working again. I suppose this gives me an option to keep old images on Gallery3, and new images in Piwigo. Still more thought needed here.