A Joomla to Drupal converter

I will absolutely never write a converter that takes content from a Joomla-driven site and tries to recreate the same site in Drupal.

First of all, the concepts of the two are far enough apart to make that very difficult to do automatically. A user would have to define quite a lot of things in the process, such as matches from categories to taxonomy, possibly for each node individually. That GUI would not be very easy to understand.

Also, there is no way I could ever build a tool that converts Joomla themes to Drupal themes. The process would therefore be semi-automatic, at best.

Joomla has modules and components, which extend the functionality. Drupal also has modules, but of course they are different. A converter would only make sense if it could handle at least the most common Joomla modules and components. A shop based on Virtuemart, for example, would have to be converted to a similar Drupal module. That's a bit like "yet another converter".

A Joomla to Drupal converter would be a good thing to have, and I could surely use one right now, but I think re-creating the site manually will be faster and lead to better results.

A backup tool that is completely independent of any hardware

My friend Arnd and I were thinking about this some time ago:

Backup solutions have one bottleneck - the hardware. CDs rot, tapes lose information eventually, the neccessary readers are difficult to come by. So the ideal backup solution would be completely hardware independent.

There is such a thing: the Internet.

Here's how it would work: my data would be split into pieces. Those pieces would then be transfered to the machines of some of my friends. I would keep a .torrent file (for example in an email saved on GMail). With that torrent file I could download all of my data using a standard BitTorrent client.

For added security, I would advise the tool to store some of my data more than once.

Now what if one of my friends buys a new machine or loses his disk? Well, as soon as his new machine would be back online, the data would be retransfered to his disk automatically. And if he chooses not to join the group again, my data would be stored somewhere else.

I would obviously donate a chunk of my disk to other people in my group.

There are some solutions out there that work like this, but not free, and not using BitTorrent for the restore process.

An "Immersive Development" IDE

I will never write an "Immersive Development" IDE (see http://immersive-development.blogspot.com/) because I do not have the resources to do so.

Cool software I will never write

Hi All!

Welcome to cool software I will never write.

This blog contains a list of software (apps and tools) that I would like to use but will realistically never write. Don't ask me why I would need such a list, I just do.

Have fun,
Jan