Specialist in complex websites from the Netherlands, active since 2004

Build. Migrate. Profit.

What others give up on, I get running again. You see the result in measurements, not in promises.

Space left in November · one developer, limited places

Measured live4,181 measurements · 2 workers
  • robertblok.com2001696 ms
  • atlasmuseum.net20069 ms
  • rbck.nl20031 ms

Twenty years ago I set up a MediaWiki because I could. Last year I rescued one for A-Pack: an art atlas supported by the French Ministry of Culture.

"Impossible" is not a conclusion, it is a hypothesis. More than one party had looked at that wiki and said it had to go and be built again from nothing. The database was repaired in place. The site is still running.

wiki139 · logs/rebuildData-20260909-015400.log · 09-09-2026 01:54

What waiting costs

Waiting feels free. Until the bill arrives.

atlasmuseum waited. This is what the delay cost in the end, from the delivery document.

  1. MediaWiki 1.26.4

    A version without security

    The wiki ran on a release from 2015, long out of security support. Pirate accounts took the site over.

  2. tens of thousands

    Spam, page by page

    Tens of thousands of spam pages and accounts had to go. The deletion list was reviewed three times, so no real work disappeared.

  3. 1.31 · 1.35 · 1.39.10

    Three upgrades in a row

    Every skipped update became another step in the repair. On top of that a new MySQL and a new PHP, twice.

  4. abandoned

    An earlier attempt, half done

    A previous migration had been started and given up. Tables were missing afterwards, and old and new were mixed.

An association supported by the French Ministry of Culture trusted me with its hardest MediaWiki. Let us stop speculating whether it can be done, and look at how we fix it.

Book your free website check

Space left in November · one developer, limited places