Ever since I started this blog in January 2005 it was powered by Serendipity (aka S9Y). Lately however I became more and more dissatisfied with it for various reasons, so I finally took the plunge and moved it over to Wordpress. The whole process was surprisingly painless, but did have some caveats, so I decided to post a short description of what I did:

There is a script for migrating S9Y to Wordpress that has been floating around for a while and has been patched/modified by various people. Luckily I found version 1.4, which got updated very recently (June 2010). For some reason it didn’t work for me when I tried to migrate between S9Y 1.5.3 and Wordpress 3.0.1 directly, so I installed Wordpress 2.9.2 first, migrated the content and then upgraded to the most recent version. The import itself was very smooth and successful, categories (which I stopped using a long time ago), users, posts and comments all made it to the new blog! Once you are done importing, you can run several SQL statements provided in readme.txt, so that your new posts will have the same IDs as the old ones, which is necessary for redirecting. For that purpose I added some Apache mod_rewrite rules, so that old post URLs will redirect to the new locations (and so will the RSS and Atom feed so subscriptions don’t get interrupted):

1
2
3
4

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/archives/([0-9]+)-.*$ /archives/$1 [R,L]
RewriteRule ^/feeds/index.rss2 /feed [R,L]
RewriteRule ^/feeds/atom.xml /feed/atom [R,L]