Phoenix, take 2

In Greek mythology, a phoenix or phenix (Greek: φοῖνιξ phoinix; Latin: phoenix, phœnix, fenix) is a long-lived bird that is cyclically regenerated or reborn. – via Wikipedia, Phoenix (Mythology) entry

A couple months back, the server where this site was hosted died in a horrible disk crash. I had (more or less) decent backups so nothing was lost, but the time to bring it back to life didn’t materialize. For the past 3+ years, I was deeply involved with a couple of eCommerce sites that took all my free time.

I left my previous employer on June 30th, and took a couple weeks of holidays to be with the family. And now I’m back to figure out what to do next.

For the past years, I felt the need to write about current events and technical issues that I found interesting, but lacked the place to do it. So one of the first priorities I had was to recover this site. The previous setup was still using a Movable Type 3.x installation, but I wanted some sort of modern setup, with the same “burn to static files” approach that MT had. I decided to use Hugo as it seems a very sensible and straightforward solution to the problem, and it is written in Go, a language that I’ve been learning over the past year or so. I also picked the Hyde-y theme for Hugo as a simple enough layout. Not sure if it will stick, but good enough for now.

To avoid any further hosting snafu’s, I’m publishing the site using GitHub pages. This unfortunately means that I have to update the RSS feed URL. You should use https://www.simplicidade.org/index.xml to subscribe to updates.

Next steps was to convert/copy the old MT posts to this new site, and add a couple of alias to make the old URLs work properly. This is still work in progress, I’ve placed the scripts I’m using in a new repository, movable_type2hugo.

It was not ready yet, still needs tweaking, but I got everything back. I had to migrate some posts from DB (with all the original metadata), some by scraping the static HTML pages that MT generated, and others from MarsEdit, with only some of the metadata. For some reason, my backup has all the HTML pages for the site, but the DB that was backed up at the same time, only has some of the pages. Weird.

Most of the previous Phoenix post is still valid, but now I’m back for more.