Halfdecent

Bye bye Wordpress

Before After

This blog has been hosted on Wordpress since 2007 and was self hosted until a few years ago when I migrated to wordpress.com. But last year at renewal I felt that the time had come to migrate to an old school static web framework and added this task to my list. This year as renewal approached I got my finger out and completed the task.

Last year I had originally looked at using jekyll with github-pages but this wasnt easy for several reasons. Firstly, these days Im much more familiar with the node ecosystem than ruby. Secondly wordpress required extra money to enable the jekyll export (which was an unwelcome surprise) and thirdly, github didnt like the latest version of jekyll. So this year I ended up using Eleventy, having seen it being used in Ben's engineering blog and webawesome (previously called shoelace) and thought it looked decent. The migration was quite straightforward and much helped by two projects:

I was able to create an xml export from wordpress and then use the first project to process that xml file into markdown files and then copy/paste those files into the second default blog project. I updated the export-to-markdown project to add dates to drafts (I was surprised by the number of drafts I had - they overwhelmed the live posts in dev mode) and I tweaked the base-blog to show the number of posts for each tag in the tags page.

Some reflections on this process include: