Migrated my old custom-built trail-journal/blog to Discourse

Migration
1

Way back in 2010 I built my own blog-like site to aggregate all the social media posts I was making while I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail. The idea was that I could post, check-in, geo-tag, and upload to various services and collect it all in one spot that people could easily subscribe to and follow my progress and leave comments.

It’s now basically just a static snapshot of that time but it was showing its age and the server is woefully behind on updates. So I decided to migrate it to my self-hosted Discourse server to see how a multi-site setup works.

All the media files in the past were simply hotlinked, so thankfully I was able to recover most of it even if I still lost a few things to bit-rot. Now it’s all safely stored on my server (minus videos). Comments were migrated over as inactive users. The few info-pages I had now redirect to topics via Permalinks. I was able to reproduce all the features I had like a chronological topic list, tags for post-types, categories for States, and a map view.

These are themes, plugins, and components I used:
Isabelle theme.
Locations plugin.
Created as Default Sort Order plugin.
Created Topic Sort theme component.
Topic List Thumbnails theme component.
and lots of CSS tweaking.

With this setup I could easily post a future hike (PCT?), or maybe even make it a platform for others to share their own hikes. Check it out at onahike.com.

20 Likes
2

Wow Daniel, I’m impressed, the site looks very nice :clap: and congrats on completing the trail, what a journey.

I think it’s the first time I’ve seen a migrated site with content from multiple social media platforms.

Nice solutions! And that map? :chefs_kiss:

9 Likes
3

I’m really fascinated by this approach, reminds me of PESOS - IndieWeb, and is something I’ve often thought about doing on Discourse.

Do you have any strategy or tools to import these various social media posts to Discourse in case you do another hike?

If so, would you mind sharing how you plan to go about it?

2 Likes
4

I haven’t used it yet, but I saw there is a RSS Polling plugin. So my first strategy would be to use that or a modified version that also makes API calls in addition to the RSS feeds.

Or build a standalone service that lives outside Discourse that fetches posts and republishes them via the Discourse API. Or maybe a third-party service like IFTTT could fetch posts and republish them to discourse via email without needing any other glue.

1 Like