Following last year’s migration and site integration I was happy with hosting most of my writing under a single, self-hosted Wordpress installation. However, lately I have been feeling the need to further simplify my setup. Getting rid of Wordpress and relying on someone else hosting my static pages sounded like a good idea: a proper Christmas-New Year project.
I exported the whole Wordpress site to Markdown
using the Jekyll Exporter WordPress plugin. It mostly did a good job,
although it was tripped a few times by the pre + code block.
As I had to check and correct some of the export,
I used the time to update the links, both within my site
and mostly to external web sites.
I hadn’t noticed that my previous integration had broken
a few internal links. However, the real problem was link rot;
the farther back I went, the worse the situation was.
Posts from ten years ago had 50% of dead links. Fifteen years ago,
75% of the links were gone. I managed to rescue some of the links
via the Internet Archive. Long live the Archive!
Then came figuring out Jekyll. I chose it, instead of more modern systems (like Hugo), because it is the tool of choice for free hosting in GitHub. I can even post directly from GitHub when travelling. I think it could also work with Gitlab. A few things I learnt:
- Using remote templates
Liquidso I could modify the templates- How to add
mathjaxto the site - Moving back the domain servers from my hosting to the name registrar,
so I could do email forwarding, and adding
AandCNAMErecords, leaving part of the old site still working (A) and moving the rest to GitHub (CNAME).
Everything seems to be working properly, but for a couple of to dos:
- I have to get favicons working, and
- Figuring out something about figure captions.
Small fries to finish.
