Paring down web presence

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
• Liquid so I could modify the templates
• How to add mathjax to the site
• Moving back the domain servers from my hosting to the name registrar, so I could do email forwarding, and adding A and CNAME records, 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.