Finally, got around to upgrading this site. It is now running on Pier-1.2. While Pier-1.2 contains a number of improvements, the two most important improvements for me are:

- clean urls, without the _s and _k parameters as is typical with seaside applications

- based on Pharo VM. While I’m not exactly sure whether Pharo is faster than Squeak, it definitely uses less resources which is important for sites running on VPS slices with limited RAM.

I did attempt to upgrade when Pier-1.1 was released. Around the same time Lukas Renggli released a plugin to automatically export and import data from a running site to another image. When I tried doing the same , after upgrading the 1.0 image to the latest code, the import plugin failed. Later, the patient folks on the mailing list told me that the exact version of the code, core classes and the plugins, need to be installed and in my case I could not get the bibliography plugin to load on the new image. In the end, I gave up as I was hard pressed for time. Data migration is perhaps the biggest problem of Pier and I hope someday it will be addressed.

This time however, I decided to simply create a new "pier" and manually copy over the contents. This is feasible only because the site currently does not have much content. But soon, I’ll have to think of a better strategy.

The thought of replacing Pier with something file based and backed by a revision control system did occur a few times, but I’ve decided to stick with Pier. There is a certain elegance to Pier. It is also very programmable partly due to being hosted in a smalltalk environment, which I’ve come to fully appreciate after having written some code this year. I’d like to build an RDF exporter but before that, a ton of things to finish. sigh.