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.
and congrats on completing the trail, what a journey.