If you can read this, that means my transition to ikiwiki has happened.

I've been interested in ikiwiki ever since Joey first wrote about it back in 2006, but it took me until just recently to finally bite the bullet and migrate to ikiwiki.

The plan was to retain everything, including comments, and I've mostly achieved that. Still, a few things were lost along the way:

  • There were a few blog entries that had special characters in their filename which blosxom didn't care about but ikiwiki didn't like. Since there were only a handful of them, I've ignored those for now. It does mean those are now dead links, but I decided it's not worth bothering about much.
  • My previous setup had a fairly intricate way to choose a different stylescript which I'm fairly sure nobody (but me) ever used. To keep things simple, I've decided not to port that over to ikiwiki. Instead, only the most recent 'grass' stylesheet has been retained (though it required some changes to accomodate for the fact that elements have different class names and ids in ikiwiki as compared to my own stuff, obviously)
  • My own comment system had threading support, which ikiwiki does not seem to have. I did consider adding it, but I've decided not to care much.

I should note that at this point I've only ported the blog itself, not the rest of my website. While ikiwiki can be used for that as well, the parts outside of my blog are fairly static and don't change all that often. In addition, those bits are set up in an even uglier way, and I didn't want to fix them up just yet.

Things I've learned:

  • ikiwiki does not track timestamps across git moves. Not sure whether this is a bug. It meant I couldn't rename the "special-characters entries" that I mentioned above, since the dates would be all wrong.
  • You can cherry-pick an entire git branch onto another branch (without having to specify each and every commit individually), if you need/want to avoid a merge commit. Apparently ikiwiki got confused about the merge commit, and we ran in the above same issue; but with cherry-picking the commits from the git-svn branch on which they were, stuff was done correctly.