Bitrot
Got me too. My old blog software probably won't be able to survive unchanged. Old Python version (2.3), old (very old) Django (0.91), old PsycoPG driver (1.0), old PostgreSQL (7.4) and all of that on an old Debian (a wild mix of various versions with backports and custom programs and several failed upgrade attempts). Argh.
Well, I'm still torn between "rewriting" and "throwing away". The latter has the charm that I won't have to carry all that junk around anymore. And honestly, nothing particularly interesting ever happened on my blog anyway. Maybe I can set up a wget mirror beforehand and dump the whole thing somewhere statically, as an archive.
Rewriting also has a lot of charm, but converting thousands of old entries (over 4000 articles and over 4000 links, plus almost 200 images) from 8 years (first entry on November 3, 2002) doesn't sound like fun. And probably thousands of the links are outdated and obsolete anyway.
No idea what I'm going to do, maybe I'll try to bring the Metaeule to the new box first, where I only have the problem that PHP4 is no longer in the Ubuntu repository for 10.04 and I therefore have to force the owl to PHP5 (and that with code based on Wordpress 1.5 - I must really be crazy).
Or I try to install an old Debian with the packages used at that time - the box doesn't run in the front, but behind other machines, so the hacking risk is rather low at that point. The Metaeule of course also has a few thousand posts in the archive (only 8291, that's almost nothing), but if I can keep the old software running (some security patches have been added over time, so it can actually continue to potter along), I don't necessarily have to tackle it.
Somehow, the internet was also such a really bad idea ...