I’m still in the process of migrating my blog from Wordpress on a VPS to micro.blog. I don’t want to be responsible for a server anymore. Keeping it up-to-date and secure is interesting at times, but gets tedious pretty quickly. I reached the point, where I can’t even update the Debian distribution anymore, because it has gotten too old, or something like that. I’m no expert, which is part of the point I’m trying to make. Also insert famous Detective Murtaugh quote here.
The import function from micro.blog is pretty good, but soon after running it the first time, I realized that I have to clean up my posts before importing them.
Checking a 20 year old blog for broken links or missing images is quite a task. I have more than 3400 entries in my database. That’s a lot, but many of them are comments and old Tweets that were cross-posted automatically. Nevertheless I want to check all of them. This is where running Wordpress has its benefits. The large community increases the probability that a plugin I need already exists, and since broken links are bad for SEO, chances are even better. A quick search reveals Broken Link Checker, which is running right now and has already found more than 950 problematic entries1.
Many private blogs or domains vanished. Videos were embedded via Shockwave/Flash plugins. Complete services have been shut down after being acquired, and last but not least I myself switched services and even my domain. Once the plugin finished, I have to decide on a case-to-case basis, what to do. I assume, there’s not much to automate in that step. At least there’s another nice plugin, that can help finding and replacing
Maybe this is a good project for 2021.
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I updated this number several times while writing. ↩︎
