Moving site to Pmwiki
23/05/2005I have been thinking about this for a while and I have decided to move most pages on this site to a Wiki1. I do not mean the Quantum Forest weblog, which lives happily in Textpattern, but the rest of the ‘static’ (not generated ‘on the fly’) pages.
I would really like to have a system that combines wikiness and weblogging, but I have not found a nice implementation. I would really like to have a Wiki that implements Textile, but I as far as I know only Instiki (a Wiki implemented in Ruby) does it at the moment, and I do not have the privileges to install it in my system. Thus, soon I will be moving all static pages to PmWiki.
Supposedly, the biggest problem would be to transform all the HTML to PmWiki markup, but I found the HTML::Wiki Converter, which does a good job moving HTML not only to PmWiki, but to:
The other issue is to redirect the old pages to the new ones, without risking losing Google (and other search engines) rankings. I will follow Google’s recommendation and use a 301 redirect, as explained here.
On top of using a ‘plain PmWiki’ implementation, I am thinking of using ‘clean URLs’ (which require these changes), user authentication (with this plugin), and extended markup (with this other plugin). The latter until I can get Textile working in PmWiki.
I will not be posting much here until I finish creating the templates, transforming content and redirecting the old pages to the new ones.
1 A previous post considers moving only the ASReml Cookbook, but I guess it is better to move the whole site now.
PS. 2005-05-31. The HTML::Wiki Converter has a few hiccups missing a few anchors inside pages and the notation for subscripts and superscripts misses the inverted commas.
PS. 2005-06-10. It took ten days for Google and Yahoo to replace the old addresses with the new ones, so the permanent redirect did work. There was a period of three days when Google was showing both the old and new addresses in search results.
Filed in software, web, writing
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